


In the Red

by stele3



Series: Red [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: AU, Gen, I have not read the comics, Pre-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 12:37:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stele3/pseuds/stele3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later, Natasha will say that she owes Clint a debt. Clint remembers it a little differently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Damman

The world is red.  
  
She can’t tell the difference between her hair and her blood. They both pool under her head, streaking the wet pavement. Red fills her mouth, pouring down her throat. Drowning her. Filling her.  
  
Something moves in her vision. It’s the archer. He drags himself across the pavement toward her and Natasha wants to scramble away from him and the livid red that covers his face and encircles the irises of his eyes, but she can’t.  
  
Reaching her, he pushes himself up until he’s kneeling, knees spread on either side of her head. His hands cradle her face. Raindrops splatter her eyes, blurring his expression. His fingers dig into the broken places inside her skull.  
  
Natasha sinks down in the red and  
  
She dies.  
  
  
  
 **1.**  
  
S.H.I.E.L.D base - location undetermined  
  
After S.H.I.E.L.D takes him into custody, Clint spends a lot of time in psychotherapy.  
  
He alternates between telling the shrink long, detailed fantasies about killing major political figures—not that Clint knows, or cares, who is in power these days—and discussing his favorite sports teams—not that Clint has ever given a shit about sports, because rooting for the local team implies a particular geographical attachment, and the circus never stayed in one place long enough for him to develop the habit.  
  
He doesn’t know what the shrink tells the higher-ups, but they eventually let him out of the little basement cell where he’d expected to spend the rest of his life. However long that turned out to be.

  
The guy who comes to collect him wears a suit like the cloth sprouted out of his pores at birth. He folds his hands in front of him and

says, “Mr. Barton, good afternoon.”

“It’s afternoon?” Clint asks.

  
“Yes. Director Fury would like to see you.”  
  
“Who’s he?”  
  
“He’s the director.”  
  
Clint eyes the suit for a long moment. “And is he full of fury?”  
  
“Not yet,” the suit replies without missing a beat. “But I wouldn’t want to keep him waiting.”  
  
They wind their way up a couple of levels. Clint has yet to see a single window in this place, so he guesses they’re still underground. The suit leads him on without a backward glance. A guy with a machine gun who knows how to use it walks five feet behind Clint.  
  
On the way they pass soldiers, scientists, and civilian contractors—a thousand ants in their hill. None of them look surprised at Clint basically being marched at gunpoint through their midst. He follows the suit into a darkened conference room. Huge screens hang on the walls, facing inward; only two are occupied, filled with the shadowed faces of people who Clint doesn’t recognize.  
  
A man sits at a table in the center of the room, wearing a long leather duster. He’s talking to the face-screen people.  
  
“—the issue of Drakoff’s daughter,” one of the face-screen people says in a gravelly voice.  
  
“I’m well aware of the _issue_ ,” the man sitting at the table says in a voice that only barely manages to tolerate fools. “I will keep you apprised of developments.”  
  
They talk a bit more beyond that. The suit stands about five feet away to Clint’s left, his hands folded and completely relaxed about being made to wait. Clint scans the room for surveillance and finds three automated firing systems before the screen-people disappear and the guy in the leather duster wheels his chair around.  
  
He has a patch over his left eye. Clint immediately closes his left eye.  
  
“Mr. Barton. I’m Director Fury. I hope you’ve been enjoying your stay with us.”  
  
“Actually I’m gonna leave a shitty review on Hotels.com. Your turn-down service sucks.

“Considering your laundry list of charges, be grateful that it’s not a needle in your arm, or worse. Nine countries have warrants out for your arrest and about half of them enjoy the benefits of capital punishment.” Fury pauses and glowers. “May I ask what the hell you think you’re doin’?”

  
“Figuring out your depth perception,” Clint replies, squinting. “I’m guessing you can’t hit anything smaller than a mason jar at fifty feet.”  
  
The suit shifts in place, betraying discomfort for the first time, but Fury only raises an eyebrow and says, “With the kind of firepower I’ve got access to? I don’t exactly need to worry about accuracy.”  
  
Clint opens both his eyes and grins. He can respect that answer.  
  
Fury sits forward in his chair, leather creaking. “Dr. Waters tells me that you’re a sociopath. She recommended either locking you up for good or turning you over to the country of our choosing. Agent Coulson, however,” Director Fury gestures towards the suit, “believes that you might still be recruited into our organization.”  
  
“Doing what, exactly?”  
  
Coulson produces a file folder from God knows where, and puts it on the table in front of Clint. On top of a thick stack of papers lies a photo of a Middle-Eastern man wearing a _keffiyeh_. “This is Hussein Kar, Jordanian arms dealer. He’s the head of Al Maut, a splinter group of Hezbollah who decided that they’d rather fight for money than for Allah. Somehow they’ve gotten their hands on a strain of super-virus, and they’re currently taking bids from China, Russia, Israel, and several other nuclear powers. Fortunately, Kar is paranoid, and he had the virus bio-electronically wired to his own brain activity. If he dies, so does the virus.”  
  
Clint looks at the picture, then at the two of them. “You want me to kill somebody.”  
  
“Your assassination stories were very well thought-out, and your aim, however rudimentary your weapon of choice, is impeccable.” Coulson pauses when Clint snorts and looks away. “Something funny?”  
  
“And here I was worried you were the good guys.”  
  
“We are,” Coulson tells him firmly.  
  
Clint sends them both his most disingenuous smile and sweeps the folder up. Making a show of perusing it, he asks, “So how do you want it done? Public, private? Criteria for identification? Any body parts you especially want saved for, I dunno, research purposes?”  
  
He quirks his eyebrows at them both. They stare back, blank and unmoved. “Hussein Kar has been declared an enemy of more than one state,” Fury tells him. “He’s attacked civilian targets, and his immediate elimination is a matter of public safety.”  
  
Clint wants to laugh in their faces, but self-preservation wins out. Instead he nods and says, “Of course. So — when do I get my bow back?”

 

  


**Outskirts of Damman - 26.3133° N, 49.9500° E**

They give him a rifle instead. It’s a decent one, at least, a Hornady A-Max .50. It still feels absurdly heavy in his hands. On the plane ride Clint practices lifting it again and again, snapping the butt up to his shoulder and sighting down the long barrel.  
  
The dozen or so S.H.I.E.L.D agents strapped in around him twitch every time he swings the gun, even though Coulson made a point of telling him, in front of everyone else, that he’d be getting ammo right before the op goes live and not a minute before.  
  
One of them, a big bald-headed guy who Clint vaguely remembers from his arrest squad, shouts over the roar of the engines. “Feeling rusty, Robin Hood?”  
  
Clint answers by pointing the muzzle in his direction. He pulls the trigger with a flourish and the bald guy’s face darkens.  
  
They bump down on a dry stretch of empty ground that barely passes as a landing strip. Just before they open the hanger doors Clint yanks the cloth tied around his neck up to cover his mouth and nose. Bleached-out murderous sunlight splits into the plane, accompanied by a swirl of grit. Around him the S.H.I.E.L.D agents hack and cough. Behind the bandanna, Clint smirks.  
  
They shuffle out in two lines, caught half-blind by the sharp contrast between the dark interior and the bright exterior. Outside, a Jeep and two Suburbans await them. After the roar of the plane engines and the brief, excruciating splash of desert sun, the interior of the car is a quiet haven of A/C and tinted windows. Clint leans back into the leather seat with a sigh.  
  
Coulson rides next to him. Everyone else has stripped to lightweight essentials, not quite casual enough to pass for civilian clothes but close; yet Coulson still wears a suit. “Do you even own other clothes?” Clint asks.  
  
“They itch,” Coulson replies, then speaks into a walkie-talkie. “Three clicks to observation point alpha.”

“What’s there?”  
  
“A point from which we can observe.”  
  
One of the agents sitting in the row of seats behind them snickers. Clint shrugs his indifference and turns back to the window, watching the perspective shift on a low wall right next to the road versus a minaret in the distance. The desert has a way of flattening out his depth of focus, making everything look like it’s on the same plane.  
  
By the time they roll to a halt, he thinks he’s got his eyes adjusted. Observation point alpha turns out to be a three-story mansion on a hill. It’s brand-new but old-fashioned, paint fumes clinging to the walls, waiting to get filled up by new owners. When they walk into the open atria in the center of the building, Clint can see through open arches on the far wall. A tangled, disorderly cityscape fills the valley below.  
  
A local greets them. Clint can’t tell if he’s the landlord or if he just found them a handy joint with a view. The man’s hands shake as he gestures. Coulson speaks to him soothingly in Arabic.  
  
Clint stands to one side while the rest of the team fans out, securing the building. They’re loud in a way that makes Clint’s skin crawl. He’s not used to having people around when he’s on a job; his brain wants to go into sniper mode but he knows he can’t afford to. Part of him is still half-convinced that he’s here to be a patsy, a Lee Harvey Oswald left at the scene to soak up the blame.  
  
Baldy’s standing seven and a half feet away, obvious in his watchfulness. He’s got a Hornady, too, though Clint would guess that his is loaded.  
  
After a while Clint pops the scope off his weapon and crosses to one of the open archways. Pressing his side against the wall, he squints through the scope, sighting out the landscape below. All roads in the city lead inward, like spokes on a wheel, to a central square that’s actually more of a lopsided circle. It’s too clear a line of sight to be accidental and Clint lets the city layout guide his eyes. A large government building with a domed roof stands in the center of the square-circle, edged on two sides by minarets. Clint has always respected that about Islamic countries: they make no pretensions about their separation of church and state, or the lack thereof.  
  
Boots scuff on the floor behind him and Baldy says, “Looking for more hookers, Barton?”  
  
Clint speaks without taking his eye away from the scope. “Hey, your mom’s got to afford your allowance somehow. Mind getting out of the fucking window?”  
  
There’s a pissed-off intake of breath, but Baldy puts his back against the other side of the archway without retort. Typical good soldier. Clint pauses in his recon long enough to ask, “So are you here in case I miss, or in case I run?”  
  
Baldy narrows his eyes at Clint and rests one straightened finger beside the trigger of his Hornady. “Try one and find out.”  
  
Clint smiles so blandly the muscles in his cheeks don’t even move. Coulson, flanked by two of the grunts but absent the nervous homeowner, walks up in time to catch it and raises one eyebrow, surprisingly directing it at them both. Baldy quickly transforms his face into ‘alert and attentive,’ but Clint keeps the fake smile in place.  
  
He’s nobody’s fucking soldier.  
  
“Our source in the courthouse confirms that Kar’s inside,” Coulson says. “Intel suggests that he’s meeting with Saoud bin Suleiman, one of the provincial judges.”  
  
“Bribing him?” Baldy guesses.  
  
“Trying to. Apparently Suleiman is turning out to be a hard man to buy, because Kar’s spent the last week making trips from his home to the courthouse. Right now about fifteen of Kar’s personal retinue are inside with him, including his favorite wife. Their home is five and a half clicks South-Southwest of here. We have observation point bravo set up there, but the home is heavily secured and fortified; there’s no hope of getting to Kar there, at least not quietly. And given that Saudi Arabia is officially a U.S. ally with personal ties to previous and current U.S. presidents, this _will_ need to be quiet. We’ve mapped their usual route and set up potential strike points victor, tango, and yankee. Now, we’ll be able to observe approximately half their trip from our current location, then shift to bravo and observe the rest from there. Once a strike point has been chosen we can go live tomorrow. Am I boring you, Barton?”  
  
Clint’s been idly staring out the window and chewing on the inside of his cheek, but now he pulls his gaze around to Coulson. “Sorta. Why’re we waiting until tomorrow? The guy’s in the courthouse now, right? So why don’t I just pop him in the head when he comes out?”  
  
Baldy looks at Clint like he doubts his mental capacity. “We’re almost two clicks out.”  
  
“Yeah. And?”  
  
“And we’re two clicks out,” Coulson says, though his tone is curious and so is his gaze. “Did you miss the part where this is an _observation_ point?”  
  
Clint rolls his eyes and reaches for the bolt handle of the Hornady hanging at Baldy’s side, yanking it back. The round in the chamber cartwheels out and he catches it neatly in his other hand before he turns and hops up onto the window ledge.  
  
Behind him voices rise, but Clint doesn’t look back. The exterior of the house is brick, weathered by the climate but still climbable. Loading the round into his weapon and swinging the sling over his shoulder in one motion, Clint reaches up to grasp the first hand-hold.  
  
He’s only gotten a couple of feet before Coulson’s voice drifts up after him. “There are stairs.”  
  
Clint pauses, the small muscles of his fingers shaking with the effort of clinging to the wall. Twisting his head, he looks down through the small gap between his armpit and the wall. Coulson is leaning out of the window, head twisted to look up at Clint. His expression is mild.  
  
“Now where’s the fun in that?” Clint asks, and heaves himself upward.  
  
The roof of the building is flat and open, no hidey-holes except for the open stairwell to the floors below. It’s also far too low: the trees around the city square are not numerous, but they’re date palms and they grow tall. Clint dusts stucco from his hands, wincing at the sting of open cuts, and walks to the edge of the roof.  
  
The next building is several feet down and criss-crossed with lines of laundry. Moving between the worn, damp sheets, Clint pauses at the scent of cigarette smoke. About twenty paces ahead of him a woman in a long, flowing black burqa sits on a folding chair. She’s pulled the front of her veil aside to smoke, and sits with her ankles crossed underneath the chair. She taps at her cell phone, flicks the ash off her cigarette, and doesn’t look up when Clint passes behind her, using her tablecloth as cover.  
  
Reaching the other side of the roof, Clint drops to a crouch then springs across a four-foot gap and a thirty-foot drop to grab the railing of a fire escape. Swinging himself up and over, he climbs upward, slipping past the windows.  
  
This time there’s no laundry or smokers, just the loud rumble of air-conditioning units at full blast. They won’t be loud enough to muffle a gunshot but they’re better than dead silence. The east side of the building has a small lip, about a foot high. Perfect. Clint swings the Hornady down off his back and kicks the supports out, dropping smoothly into the prone position.  
  
It takes a few adjustments to get zeroed in. It’s been a while since he’s shot from this distance. He’s never liked it—too far removed from all the possible variables, from all the minute changes that can happen on the ground. He doesn’t just prefer a bow for the style points.  
  
It’s a little past noon. Down in the square, people move around with a spring in their step, fresh from midday prayer. Clint has a private theory that the Islamic tradition of prescribed prayer times is as much to keep the populace from suffering heatstroke as for any spiritual reasons.  
  
A steady trickle of people move in and out of the courthouse, not enough that he worries especially about collateral damage. A quick glance around the periphery shows security cameras over the door and on the rooftops. Three women follow a man inside. Their burqas flap in a breeze that Clint doesn’t feel and he adjusts his aim minutely to the left then settles in to wait.  
  
After a while his elbows start to ache. S.H.I.E.L.D didn’t see fit to give him an arm pad. Clint ignores it long enough that endorphins rise to match the pain, dulling its edges. Sunburn forms on the back of his neck and his scalp tingles with the promise of future pain. Eventually, though, even that sensation fades.  
  
The roar of the air conditioners drops to a hum. The world narrows to the small circle inside his scope. His depth of focus flattens out again: it feels like he’s right there in the square, sitting on the steps outside the courthouse. Another pair of women cross from left to right on the sidewalk and he can almost hear the clack of their sandals. The double doors of the courthouse creak as they open, tires squeal as cars slip through the bottom of his scope...he can hear and feel it all.  
  
Hussein Kar’s face looms out of the dark of the courthouse, and Clint snaps into focus.  
  
Kar descends the stairs. There’s a couple of guys on either side of him but his head is only bent towards one of them, a shorter guy on his right. Kar is more clean-shaven than in the mug shot Coulson provided. He wears a suit and his beard has been clipped. He looks like he’s in his late 30’s. To his left, a young woman with her head bared carries a small child. Clint can’t tell the kid’s age from this distance.  
  
Kar reaches the bottom of the stairs and level ground, walking towards Clint. It feels like any second he’s going to look up and see Clint watching him.  
  
Clint breathes in.  
  
Holds it.  
  
Squeezes the trigger to release his breath, and the bullet.  
  
It takes a little over two full seconds for it to travel from the end of the rifle to the tiny round world in his scope. When it does, Kar’s head explodes in a starburst of blood.  
  
Clint swings down from position to lie flat on his back, the gun on top of him. The expansion of his awareness briefly, predictably dazzles him. The sun has moved, shadows lengthening. It feels like he’s traveled forward in time a couple hours. Clint gives himself a few moments to adjust then rolls over onto the hot surface of the rooftop and Army-crawls his way back to the fire escape with the Hornady cradled in his bent arms. The skin of his already-abused elbows tears and bleeds.  
  
As he descends the fire escape, the low murmur of radio chatter drifts up to meet him. Coulson and the others have taken up base on the adjacent rooftop, hiding among the linens. The smoking woman is nowhere to be seen. Coulson himself stands straight and still, a pair of binoculars trained on the pandemonium unfolding in the city square below  
  
Despite his awareness of their movements, it jolts him a little to see them there, waiting for him. His mind feels slow, still in sniper mode; usually after a job he gives himself a few days to come out of it, but he’s not setting his own tune, here.  
  
When Clint lands back on the rooftop, though, no one says anything. They stare at him with disbeliefs and awe and even fear, as if they’d forgotten what he is, what he does, what they arrested him for in the first place.  
  
Clint takes a deep breath, forcibly shaking off the sniper. The taste of gunpowder ghosts over the back of his throat. “You guys wanna kill anyone else while we’re in town?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coulson pic from 'Thor' screenshot  
> Fury pic from 'Ironman 2' screenshot  
> Damman aerial view from postcard by Ron Playle  
> Barton gif from 'Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol,' made by assvenger on Tumblr


	2. Saskatchewan

**2.**  
  
S.H.I.E.L.D base - location undetermined  
  
Two more successful, uneventful missions pass before they move Clint upstairs, out of the detention center. They pass a long row of closed doors as they leave. Clint allows himself only the briefest moment to wonder who’s on the other side of those closed doors, and what they did to deserve being there. Whether any of them had been offered the same chance as he has, and what they’re doing with it.  
  
One of the lackeys who isn’t Coulson leads him through one of a long line of doors into his new bedroom. It contains: a bed, with white sheets and a gray comforter; a bedside table adorned with a lamp and an alarm clock; a sliding-door closet that stands open and empty; and a door to a narrow bathroom in the opposite wall. A towel, handtowel, and washcloth sit in a small, neat stack on the foot of the bed. They are all the same shade of gray, slightly darker than the comforter.  
  
Clint looks at the lackey, a short, pretty, dark-skinned woman who stands with her hands tucked in the small of her back. He’d bet they recruited her from the military; there’s a fair number of ex-military agents, but not as many as he might have expected.  
  
“Does yours look like this?” he asks, canting his head at the room.   
  
Her generous mouth quirks slightly. “You get used to it after a while.”  
  
Once she leaves Clint prowls through the room and bathroom, scanning for bugs. He finds only one, some kind of body scanner built into the wall above his bed with a tag attached that says, _ATTENTION: removal of medical monitor is a violation of S.H.I.E.L.D Disease and Infection Prevention Protocol (Employee manual 14.3.789)_. Clint snorts and leaves it alone.  
  
A slow but steady movement in the corner of his eye draws his attention to the closet. It, too, seems free of surveillance equipment...but the hangers swing just slightly from side to side. Clint’s breath stills as he watches them sway.  
  
The gait of someone walking way too hard on his heels alerts Clint to Coulson’s approach before his voice does. “I hope our turndown service has improved to your standards.”  
  
Clint turns slowly. The faint trace of amusement in Coulson’s face fades into a faint trace of alarm at Clint’s expression.  
  
“We’re moving right now, aren’t we?” It’s not really a question.  
  
A new emotion slides across Coulson’s features and he rocks back onto one well-used heel, gesturing for Clint to follow. “I guess it’s time you saw the full operation.”  
  
Clint follows warily. They journey upwards even further and now Clint is aware of a low vibration in the floor. He’d like to think that the lower levels have built-in shock absorbers and soundproofing, rather than the possibility that he overlooked a massive mechanical hum for the three weeks he’s been in and out of the base. He’s always been transported with a sensory deprivation hood over his head, so other than a strong wind he’s never gotten any clues as to their current location, or  what the base looks like.  
  
They pass through a series of automatic double-doors and the roar of engines shoots up in volume—so yes to the soundproofing and shock absorbers, thankyouverymuch. At the same time the temperature drops sharply and—  
  
 —and there’s nothing ahead of Coulson except a glass wall, and open sky on the other side.  
  
Clint has a sharp, brief, terrifying burst of vertigo as his mental map of the S.H.I.E.L.D base wavers, collapses inwards, and shoots upward 50,000 feet to reconstitute itself in the air. Meanwhile, his speculative escape plans disintegrate entirely.  
  
“Huh,” he says aloud.  
  
  
  


 

 

  


**Saskatchewan wilderness - 55.2200° N, 105.8500° W**

“Fuck, my fucking balls,” Clint grumbled through his teeth. Only long years of practice kept him from shivering hard enough to affect his aim.  
  
The target is Jonathan Kern, a paramilitary white supremacist type who’d bombed a series of black churches and government buildings in Chicago before appearing to die himself in the final explosion. It had taken five years for anyone to figure out that he’d actually faked his death and escaped across the border into Canada.  
  
S.H.I.E.L.D had been narrowing down his location ever since, and last month they’d got a hit: a supermarket surveillance camera in Prince Albert had caught him buying whiskey.  
  
Hopefully the whiskey had been worthwhile.  
  
Another couple of weeks of triangulating Kern’s Internet signal and studying satellite images of North Saskatchewan had finally yielded a target. Kern’s got a small cabin in the hills, surrounded with approximately a dozen Vietnam-era mines. He has multiple wireless cameras mounted along the rough, single-lane dirt road to his house, police scanners, and a massive arsenal of high-powered explosives.  
  
All of which translates to Clint riding on the back of a snowmobile for fifteen miles then rucking it cross-country through snow drifts, solo and under radio silence, for another five in order to scale the ridge East of Kern’s house.  
  
Clint had begged to be allowed to use his bow, but apparently that’s too high-profile and distinctive: no one thinks a thing of people winding up with bullets through their heads, but arrows would draw attention, or so claims Coulson.  
  
It’s still a close shot, maybe two thousand feet, clean sightline, minimal wind. Clint could make it in his sleep. Take away the mines and there is absolutely zilch of interest in the hit.  
  
Clint wonders if he’s being punished for something. Over the past few days he’s been given a longer leash, allowed to move around the helicarrier unaccompanied. Not unobserved, of course, and half the people who wander its halls could cap him in the spine before he caused any real havoc. Some of them look more than happy to do so: he’s run into Baldy a couple of times, and Clint sends him a big smile every time.  
  
As far as escape attempts go, short of grabbing a parachute and oxygen mask, he’s pretty much stuck. He’s flown a plane before, poorly: he and Barney once stole a single-engine from an airshow happening next door to the circus. They’d barely gotten five miles before crashing in a field.  
  
So he’s kept his hands in sight and made no sudden moves. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know exactly where the parachutes and oxygen masks are, but so far no one’s given him cause to use them.  
  
That might be about to change, depending on the state of his balls when all this is over.  
  
Movement in the house draws his attention. Kern walks past the windows a couple of times. A thin trickle of smoke starts to rise out of the top of the house. A side door opens up and there’s the sound of wood being moved. Clint briefly considers shifting position, but decides to hold. Satellite photos indicate that Kern makes regular trips outside, checking the perimeter. If they were wrong then Clint’s going to have some choice words with the goddamn surveillance crew that probably _will_ result in him needing a parachute.  
  
Another hour passes—in which Kern probably fixes himself some pancakes, maybe sits by the woodstove for a while—before the man finally emerges from the front of the house.  
  
He’s aged a lot from the photograph S.H.I.E.L.D provided. His shoulders have shrunk and his beard has grown bushy and white. He wears saggy, stained long johns, a beanie, and coveralls, and carries a hunting rifle on his shoulder. He looks like a cross between Ted Kaczinsky and a neo-Nazi Santa Claus.  
  
Clint draws a bead on him, but pauses with his finger curled around the trigger.  
  
He watches Kern stretch his limbs, peering out into the snowy world around his cabin. The flakes have stopped falling for now, but the skies are still overcast. Clint hopes they stay that way: if the sun comes out the reflection on the snow could blind him.  
  
Kern yawns, scratches his balls, resettles the gun on his shoulder, and steps off the porch. Clint tracks him across the yard almost idly. Kern moves with a limp, something that wasn’t in his dossier. Maybe he twisted his ankle getting wood one morning. Maybe he slipped in the bathtub and broke his hip. Watching him hobble through the snow, Clint doesn’t see a threat to national security, just a broken old man.  
  
About fifty feet east-southeast from his front door, Kern stops and eases himself down to a crouch. Clint perks up as he starts carefully brushing aside snow. One of the mines, then. Clint had previously noted several depressions in the snow around the cabin, but it’s nice to have confirmation. He watches Kern futz with the top of the mine for a few minutes, his movements surprisingly dexterous. Whatever else he’s lost over the years, he still knows how to handle things that go boom.  
  
Finishing up whatever he was doing with the mine, Kern uses the butt of his rifle to lever himself up. He turns, dusting snow from his pants, and Clint’s finger finally tightens.  
  
The bullet catches Kern dead center in the chest. He drops his gun, hunching forward in shock and cupping his hands over his chest. The one that follows hits his upper left shoulder. His head flies back, eyes and mouth gaping.  
  
For a long, silent moment he wavers, his bearded face etched with pain and almost-comical surprise. His balance tips, as inexorable as the Earth’s spin. Up on the ridge, Clint opens both his eyes. The two Kerns overlay one another: one far away and the other up close.  
  
Kern wobbles and finally drops onto his back. There’s a split second where he just lies on the snowy ground before the mine goes off.  
  
Clint watches it explode, unmoving. He can’t quite remember the layout of the mines, if they’re clustered close enough to trigger one another.  
  
It just seemed like such a waste not to set at least one of them off.  
  
Rock and dirt flies up and out in all direction, accompanied by a suspicious pink mist. The larger piece fall back to Earth the fastest, creating their own craters. Nothing else happens, though. Too bad.  
  
Clint rolls away from the rifle, groaning at limbs gone stiff in the cold. Shaking out his hands, he puts his back against a nearby tree trunk. His watch says 1412, plenty of time before sundown. He hopes that Coulson had taken Clint seriously when he’d requested to have a thermos of hot cocoa waiting for him when he got back to the car.  
  
He’s just about to call it in when a new thought enters the forefront of his mind, lunging out of the shadows where it’s been lurking ever since he was taken into custody.  
  
He could run. He’s got a ten-mile range from Coulson and the rest of the pickup crew. It wouldn’t be that hard to pack up the rifle, maybe pillage some supplies from Kern’s cabin...blow the rest of the mines and fake his death, even.  
  
It is, he realizes, pretty much exactly what Kern had done, minus the rampant racism.  
  
The comparison is too neat to be a mistake. With a smirk, Clint recognizes Coulson’s hand. Fury wouldn’t have the patience or subtlety to set Clint up this way. To him, Clint is a tool, useful until he isn’t anymore. Coulson, though, is the type to take a tool and refine it into something new.  
  
He’s laid out the options without a single word, trusting Clint to see it for himself. Clint would appreciate the confidence if he didn’t hate being manipulated. That doesn’t make the choice any less real: there’s his bland, grey, monitored room waiting for him back on the helicarrier, or he can try to find his own shelter in the wilds of Canada or wherever. Clint doesn’t doubt that he could...but sooner or later he might find himself on the receiving end of a sniper round, run down like an animal despite all his best preparations.  
  
It isn’t a threat, exactly. Clint gets the impression that Coulson doesn’t care much for threats. He wouldn’t bribe, either. He’s just laying down a fact of the world they both live in: if you are not Us then you are Them. Seeing the helicarrier had driven home the rising power and influence of S.H.I.E.L.D. ‘We’ get food and shelter and new orders; ‘They’ get to find their goddamn way in the world, and God help Them if they cross Us.  
  
Clint still doesn’t know what he’d done to get on S.H.I.E.L.D’s radar. It seems kind of pointless to ask: he hadn’t been one of Them and that had warranted taking him into custody. Except now Coulson apparently wants to adopt him for real, wants Clint to make the _choice_ to stay. Clint wonders if he’s run the idea past Fury at all or if he’s taking the initiative on his own.  
  
He wonders if Coulson’s got someone on deck to track him down if he does run.  
  
He sits on the top of the hill a while longer before he digs the radio out of his pack. “Olly olly oxen free. Anybody out there?”  
  
There’s a brief pause—the exact length of time it takes Coulson to roll his eyes—before his voice crackles on the radio. “Come back, Coyote, could not copy that.”  
  
“Okay, whose idea was it to call me Coyote? Seriously?” He clicks off the radio, waits, then grimaces and grudgingly adds, “Over.”  
  
Coulson’s reply says that he’d been waiting for that; Clint can recognize when he’s being trained. “If you have any preferred alternatives, by all means. Please confirm objectives cleared, over.”  
  
Clint glances down the hill. Even from this distance he can see how the pink mist—all that remains of Kern—has settled on the snow around the blast crater. “Confirmed. Body identification might be an issue, though. Over.”  
  
As it happens, Coulson does have a thermos ready for him. If he’s pleased that Clint made the return journey, he doesn’t show it other than a brief smile. “Care to give any explanation for the pyrotechnics?”  
  
Clint doesn’t respond immediately, busy guzzling half the hot chocolate. It has tiny marshmallows. Finally lowering the thermos, he wipes his mouth and says in little puffs of foggy, heated breath, “He fell over.”  
  
Coulson makes a little _hmm_ noise but doesn’t inquire further. They sit in silence, disturbed only by the roar of the car’s heating vents and the wet sound of its tires on the slushy road.  
  
After they finally reach semi-paved roads again, Clint turns to Coulson and says, “In the circus they called me Hawkeye.”  
  
Coulson’s expression betrays no surprise at this statement. “I was under the impression that you wouldn’t especially like to be reminded of the circus.”  
  
Which is a fair assumption to make, and somewhat kinder a sentiment than Clint would have expected, even from Coulson. He shrugs, turning back to the view out his window. “I chose the name.”  
  
It was one of the few things he’d ever chosen, something that was _his_.  
  
“Duly noted,” Coulson says, and gives the order to get them back to base.  
  
  
 **S.H.I.E.L.D helicarrier – somewhere above Western Europe**  
  
Sometime in the night Clint wakes up with a jerk, Kern’s face lurking behind his eyelids.  
  
Sitting up he swings his feet out of bed and sits there gripping the edge of the mattress as his brain finishes clawing its way out of sleep. Hopefully the damn medical monitor won’t go off and alert anyone about his fast-beating heart.  
  
 _It’s not the kill_ , Clint tells himself. He grew out of dreaming about the people he’s killed a long time ago. It doesn’t bother him. This is delayed adrenaline, all the feelings of nervousness and anxiety that he has to suppress out in the field. It’s the reverse of the sniper mode—everything that gets bottled up when he looks through a scope doesn’t evaporate, it just gets stored up for later and usually results in a couple of sleepless nights as his brain relives everything that could go wrong.  
  
Could have _gone_ wrong. Past-tense. He did it, it’s done. Nothing went wrong. He didn’t miss.  
  
That’s a dangerous thought, one that Clint recognizes. Fury and Coulson, they’ve found a use for him. Just like Trickshot, and the Swordsman, and Barney had use for him, until they didn’t anymore. Mom and Dad never had any use for him at all, and that had been about half the problem.  
  
Clint leans forward, putting his elbows on his knees and breathing in and out slowly.  
  
It’s different this time, though: he doesn’t buy what they’re selling. They can talk about the greater good all they want and hell, maybe they even mean it. But they’ve brought him on as a hired gun. He’s here to kill people. He’s made the call to stick around rather than risk whatever happens if he doesn’t, but that’s all it is.  
  
He’s not getting any more sleep tonight. If he weren’t, well, semi-imprisoned on board a flying goddamn fortress, he’d find some cheap booze and cheaper women to spend the rest of the night with. As is, he pulls on a sweater and goes wandering through the halls.  
  
Even at this hour—whatever hour it is—there are people around; Clint makes a game of avoiding them in the halls, hefting himself up into vents and swinging over railings to hang upside-down on catwalks while the night owls or early birds walk by, oblivious.  
  
Above one of the entries to the aft mess hall he finds a nice little niche where the wall and the ceiling meet at a strange angle. He’s pretty sure a machine gun was supposed to be mounted there at some point: he can see the bolts in the wall for a gun mount, but either they scrapped the idea or it made people too nervous to eat so they took it down.  
  
Clint curls up there and finally feels his nerves stop jangling quite so hard. Below him, people filter in and out of the mess hall, alone in or groups, their voices drifting up to his silent, listening ears.  
  
He’s not one of Them and he never will be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Picture of Mira is actress Monique Gabriela Curnen  
> Picture of helicarrier is from the Avengers concept art by Nathan Schroeder  
> Picture of Saskatchewan is from worldofstock.com  
> Gif of Clint with the gun is from 'The Bourne Legacy' trailer; created by flyingwithoutsegues on Tumblr


	3. Seoul

**3.**   


 

  


**Seoul, Yongsong-gu - 37.5533° N, 126.9660° E**

The Seoul mission is weird. Not that Clint objects to weird. The point-and-shoot or, even worse, the point-and-wait-and-wait-and-shoot only goes so far before Clint starts to welcome whatever bizarre shit the world can throw his way.  
  
He must be moving up in the company, as “up” as a semi-imprisoned assassin can move. They still won’t give him his bow, but they’re trusting him with bigger cases, shit that would probably require all sorts of security clearances if he were an actual agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.  
  
Not that they tell him much beyond _Hey, the people in this location might not actually be human anymore, we’re still looking into it, so we want you to wear this biohazard mask when you shoot them. Just, you know, in case of spores._  
  
“Spores?” Clint asks, eyeing the mask.  
  
“We’re looking into it,” Coulson confirms before putting on his own mask.  
  
In turns out to be not such a crazy idea, especially after Clint pops one of the hotel maids with a tranquilizer and the maid sort of... _bursts_.  
  
“Whoa.” He squints through the scope, watching a swirl of white erupt over the fallen body, like thick dust. “Yeah, I think that’s a positive on the spores.”  
  
“Roger that,” Coulson says over the radio, even though he’s standing right next to Clint, holding binoculars up to the plastic covering on his mask. “Proceed with biohazard precautions. Carter, Olios, seal off the exits. No one gets in or out until R &D comes up with a counter-agent. Huffman, you’re on point. See if you can find the nest.”  
  
Still hunched over his rifle, Clint mouths _The NEST??_ but says nothing out loud. Then he blurts, “We’ve got cross-traffic.”  
  
Up on the fourth floor of the hotel, a second maid has walked out of a room straight into the spore cloud. She drops, clutching at her face, and seizes on the floor for several minutes. Clint darts his eyes sideways at Coulson, who only stands and watches.  
  
After a while both the maids get back up, moving like jerky puppets. They look at each other, having some kind of a silent communication, then move in opposite directions, striding through the hotel.  
  
“Mode of transmission confirmed,” Coulson murmurs into the radio.  
  
They spend a grueling two days locking down all seven floors of the hotel. The South Korean government invents a tuberculosis cover and institutes a two-block quarantine zone.  
  
Clint moves through the evacuated streets, circling the hotel and shooting anyone he catches in the windows, balconies, or exterior hallways. Right now they’re using tranqs in the hopes that a counter-agent can be found, but Clint’s got an ammo box of live rounds in his backpack.  
 Those are for anyone who tries to break out of the quarantine zone and can’t be dropped with darts. He’s a little surprised that Coulson trusts him with that call, but given the circumstances Clint figures it’s the lesser of two evils.  
  
Around 3am on the second day, Coulson’s lackey Mira tracks him down and hands him a handful of new vials. “Try these.”  
  
Clint loads them into his tranq gun and shoots a guest on the third floor, running along the balcony, while Mira watches through night-vision goggles. He drops, convulses, then gets back up looking confused but distinctly non-infected.  
  
“Score one for the science division,” Mira says and gets on the radio. “Huffman, what’s your six? We’ve hit someone with the possible cure, outside room...318.”  
  
“On it,” Huffman’s voice replies over the radio. Clint spots him and two other agents in full tactical biohazard gear, moving slowly down the exterior hallway towards the downed guest.  
  
“You’re all welcome, by the way,” Clint comments.  
  
Huffman snorts. “I’ll thank you when you’re in here busting your ass and dealing with tourists and screaming kids who may or may not be infected with some kind of—”  
  
Mira clears her throat loudly, code for _not in front of the semi-prisoner._ Clint shrugs his disinterest at her.  
  
“—some kind of classified thing,” Huffman finishes lamely.  
  
“Yeah? You made any progress with that? ‘Cause we’ve been here for two days and I’m not seeing any _Huffman get down!_ ”  
  
He’s shooting before he finishes speaking. Fortunately Huffman’s reaction is faster than the amount of time it takes for the ‘cure’ tranq to travel from the end of Clint’s gun to the throat of the guy lunging out of a doorway with a knife, so they don’t get to test the effects of the counter-agent on a normal human immune system.  
  
Mira’s breath hisses between her teeth. Clint lowers the gun and pointedly waits for Huffman to wearily sway back to his feet before prompting, sweet as syrup, “You were saying, Baldy?”  
  
“Yeah, yeah.” Huffman lifts his hand in thanks as his team moves in on the two downed hotel guests.  
  
Mopping up takes another two days, most of it devoted to clearing _some kind of classified thing_ out of the basement with flamethrowers. Clint is more than happy to sit that one out: S.H.I.E.L.D has rented out the entire top floor of the hotel for the team, and Clint claims the penthouse for himself while all the other poor saps are still injecting tourists and sterilizing the basement.  
  
He doesn’t really do that much except stretch out on the king-sized bed, watch TV, and order PBJ sandwiches from room service. Clint is always excruciatingly careful not to expect much from life: he doesn’t fetishize white picket fences or beautiful women on jet skis or bullshit like that. As such, a PBJ sandwich delivered to his door and a warm, clean bed to sleep in feels ridiculously extravagant.  
  
Unfortunately he’s never managed to keep himself from hoping for things from other _people_.  
  
Therein lies the great problem of his life.  
  
Coulson comes to collect him while Clint is in the middle of enjoying the world’s most ridiculous bubble bath. Suds flow over the edge of the bath across the bathroom floor, and Coulson stands in the doorway with one eyebrow raised. “I see you’re enjoying yourself.”  
  
“More than you will ever know,” Clint sighs happily. “You wanna act out _Pretty Woman_?”  
  
“No. Need I remind you that we’re technically still on tactical alert?” Clint reaches into the mountain of bubbles covering him and pulls out a dripping but still-lethal Desert Eagle, waving it at Coulson, who rolls his eyes. “We’re finishing up downstairs. Get dressed, we’re moving out in twenty.”  
  
“You never buy me flowers anymore.” Coulson actually scowls and flips the bird over his shoulder as he turns away from the doorway. Clint cackles, delighted; usually he can’t get much of a rise out of Coulson.  
  
Twenty-one minutes later Clint wanders into the abandoned third-floor lobby, where the rest of the team is waiting in various states of disarray. Only Coulson and Mira look halfway pulled-together, and there’s something greenish smeared all over Huffman’s boots.  
  
Mira shoots him an amused look. “You smell like jojoba oil.”  
  
“You could have, too,” Clint reminds her. He’d tried unsuccessfully to get Mira to join him in the penthouse. Clint’s always had a thing for a lady in combat gear.  
  
Mira rolls her eyes--seriously, that has to be something they train people for--and next to her Coulson says, “Stop sexually harassing my team, Barton.”  
  
“Harassing, I’m not _harassing_. Do you feel harassed?” Clint asks Mira.  
  
“I feel harassed,” Huffman puts in.  
  
“Baldy, I promise you, there is _nothing_ sexual in my treatment of you.”  
  
“Focus, please,” Coulson says sharply and they jump to attention. “Huffman, what’s our status on-site?”  
  
“Building has been cleared, sir,” Huffman raps out like the good little soldier he is. “We’ve done three floor-by-floor patrols and scanned with infrared. All contaminant sites have been wiped and the nest has been fried. There’s no trace of the spores.”  
  
“Olios, casualties?”  
  
“Fifteen,” Mira reports, and there’s real sadness buried underneath the layers of professional distance. She _cares_. Clint’s kind of relieved that she didn’t take him up on the penthouse offer. “Three staff and two guests didn’t survive infection, and ten were attacked and killed by carriers. Sixteen others are still quarantined in ICU. Our contacts at the hospital have been briefed and are monitoring their recovery.”  
  
“And what happens when they get out of quarantine and start talking about nests and mind control?” Clint asks.  
  
“Then they get diagnosed with psychotic breaks brought on by the stress of being under tuberculosis quarantine,” Coulson says. “They spend a while in therapy, get a clean bill of health, and go back to their lives.”  
  
“Is there anywhere you guys _don’t_ have contacts? Like, Sea World?”  
  
“Naw, we already got big, dumb mammals to do tricks for us,” Huffman says with a pointed smirk.  
  
Clint has his mouth open to retort when he’s interrupted by the plink of broken glass and a high-pitched whiz.  
  
The bullet catches Huffman in the back of his skull and he corkscrews as he falls to the floor. Clint beats him there, one hand clenched in Coulson’s tie, dragging him down as well.  
  
“Fuck--!”  
  
“Watch out, down! Downdowndown!”  
  
“Will!”  
  
More bullets follow the first, peppering the lobby and spraying them all with glass shards and blood. People hit the floor, only half of their own volition. Distantly Clint can hear the gun firing in sharp bursts—a SAW, built expressly for the purpose of pinning down targets and laying into them until no one gets up.  
  
“Barton!” That’s Coulson, flat on his stomach but still carrying command in his voice. Hell if Clint knows what Coulson expects him to do.  
  
What he does is roll hard to his right, towards the windows. He rolls over someone who doesn’t react and sweeps up their M16 as he goes. There’s an expanding number of holes in the walls of the hotel so Clint jams the muzzle of his weapon into one, letting the angle guide him, and blindly opens return fire.  
  
He’s burned through half a clip before incoming rounds cut off. Clint finishes off the clip then rolls back, grabs another from the first prone body he can find, jams it in, and rolls to his feet.  
  
Whoever the shooter is, they catch the aggressive movement. A spray of bullets follow him down the hall, slamming into the wall right behind him. Clint doesn’t bother firing back, just throws up one arm to protect his head from showering plaster and sprints that much faster. He can actually feel the air breaking around the bullets as they whiz past the back of his neck.  
  
He slams through the door to the stairs. The inside of the stairwell is concrete and plaster and probably the strongest part of the building. The bullet trajectories had been angled sharply upwards, but Clint heads for the roof. Whoever’s out there has a lot more firepower than him; he’s going to need the high ground.  
  
By the time he gets to the roof, the SAW has cut off. Clint sprints for the edge. Far below, a black Jeep is swerving out of the hotel parking lot. Clint doesn’t even try to shoot, just waits until the Jeep reaches the street.  
  
It turns left. He turns right.  
  
Hardly any of the streets in Seoul follow a grid pattern. Clint has spent two days circling the streets around the hotel and two more days peering down at them from the penthouse: he knows their layout by heart, by step, by stone. He knows the path the Jeep will have to take to get clear.  
  
He has one chance to intercept, and only one.  
  
The facade of the hotel juts out on the south side, a narrow, decorative strip of steel that’s maybe six inches wide. Clint doesn’t stop to think about what that means, about how far it is to the next rooftop. He runs out on the facade and jumps into space, stretching with everything in him.  
  
The next rooftop has a fancy garden on top. Clint lands in shrubbery with his knees bent, rolling to absorb the impact, and comes back up with leaves in his hair.  
  
In his mind, the Jeep bears left, screeching down the hill past the hotel’s parking garage. It passes the welcome sign and turns right.  
  
The building with the garden rooftop has a connecting walkway that crosses the street. Clint drops down onto it and curses wildly as he loses his grip on the M16. The roof of the walkway is slightly curved and the gun slides away. He lunges, catching the sling, and almost slides straight off after it. Only the soles of his S.H.I.E.L.D-issue boots save him.  
  
Below him there’s the roar of an engine as the Jeep hurtles by. Clint scrambles back up and starts to draw a bead on the rear window but catches himself. Too long a shot with the wrong gun.  
  
Shoving himself back up, he runs across the walkway and uses the side of the building to catapult himself upward. The next gap is short in length but a three-story drop.  
  
Clint unhooks the sling from the M16 and stretches it out to its five-foot length, then whips off his belt, jacket, and boots. Tying it all together--shoelaces to shoelaces to belt to gun sling to one jacket sleeve--costs him thirty seconds and he curses under his breath the entire time.  
  
The Jeep turns left.  
  
Wedging one of the boots against a drainpipe, Clint grips the other end of the sling, hesitates for the barest moment, then jumps over the side of the building.  
  
For a sickening moment everything stretches and he thinks the boot has come free. Then the sling goes taut, almost wrenching out of his hand. He twists, smacking into the face of the building and almost losing the fucking gun again. Hissing, he gets his bare feet planted on the side of the building and shoves off, letting go. It’s still a long drop and he shouts in pain as his feet hit the rough surface of the next rooftop.  
  
The Jeep leaves the quarantine zone. There’s a crowd of reporters, Korean military personnel, and other lookie-loos on the other side of the perimeter, and it would have to slow down. It would slow down to get through the crowd because the shooter doesn’t want to draw too much attention, and then it would speed up as it hits the streets, moving into civilian traffic.  
  
His feet leave red footprints behind him as Clint runs.  
  
He reaches the edge of the roof, stretches the last step into a leap, catches one foot on the edge, and throws his weight sideways.  
  
The world turns as he cartwheels over the street but even upside-down he can sight. Below him, the Jeep throws on its brakes, swerving from side to side. He can’t get a bead on the driver but Clint pops three bullets through the engine block then drops the gun  
  
His body completes its arcing, midair rotation and a balcony looms up before him. Clint slams into it chest-first, clawing for purchase.  
  
He slips, dropping a sickening twelve feet and a full story before the balcony of the next floor down looms up at him. He scrabbles again, almost catching his jaw on the ledge, and manages to wrap both hands around the railing.  
  
Below and behind him, tires squeal and metal collides with metal. Clint tightens his hold with one hand and lets go with the other, twisting to look down. The Jeep has slammed into a parked car, its hood oozing smoke out of the three holes he’d put in it. People mill around in shock and curiosity, frightened enough to keep their distance but not enough to run away. The M16 is nowhere to be seen.  
  
He’s about to swing up and over the balcony when something red flashes in the corner of his eye and grabs his attention. The driver’s gone to ground, sprinting South on the street.  
  
Someone on the other side of the balcony yells in Korean and Clint lets go, drops twelve feet and catches the railing of the balcony one story down. He lets go of that one, twists, lands in a crouch on the pavement, and shoves himself up in pursuit.  
  
People dart out of his way, closing in behind him to point and shout. Clint puts his head down and breaks out into the street, running past the cars that have slowed down to rubber-neck.  
  
Ahead of him, the shooter cuts through alleys and businesses, zig-zagging like a rabbit gone to ground. Clint follows, barefoot and unarmed except for the Bowie knife strapped to his thigh. His chest burns from slamming into the balcony. In his ear he can hear Coulson’s voice over the comm, but he’s in sniper mode, everything pared down to the target in his sights. An arrow in flight.  
  
They wind downhill again, heading towards the river. The shooter’s got a couple hundred feet of head start but that distance is shrinking. Clint starts to get quick glimpses: a black tactical suit, empty holsters strapped to both thighs, and long hair the color of fresh blood.  
  
They hit the industrial area by the river. Clint expects to head towards one of the bridges but instead the shooter veers East, heading past the train station then cutting left around a building.  
  
Clint pulls up hard and gets out the knife. Slowly he moves along the edge of the building and uses the reflection of the knife’s blade to look around the corner. When it shines clear he pokes his head out.  
  
The shooter’s about five hundred feet away, on the other side of a series of train tracks. It’s a woman. Clint can’t make out much except her hair fluttering in the wind. She stands with her legs apart and feet planted, her head turned in his direction.  
  
Clint steps away from the corner of the building, moving out into the open but not pursuing. At this distance making a shot with a handgun would be questionable. He could make it, but he’s betting she can’t.  
  
Instead he lets her see him seeing her.  
  
Sniping isn’t just about the kill. It’s about getting away clean, unmarked and unmade.  
  
He stares across the rows of train tracks and thinks,  
  
 _You didn’t get away._  
  
For a long moment she stands unmoving, looking back at him. A train wails; it’s a slow-moving freight, rolling on one of the many tracks between them. It will pass just in front of her, barely six feet away. It wails again, but she doesn’t look away from Clint.  
  
Just before it draws abreast of her, her body winds up to spring.  
  
Clint stays where he is as the train moves between them, waiting until it passes to reveal empty earth before he turns away.  
  
  
 **S.H.I.E.L.D helicarrier – somewhere over Southeast Asia**  
  
The normally-implacable halls of the helicarrier buzz with activity, like an anthill that’s been poked with an excessively large stick. For once Clint feels some commonality with the S.H.I.E.L.D drones: he’s wound up, too, with no release in sight.  
  
Clint finds himself in the dinky little lounge area just outside the main living quarters, staring blindly out the windows at the sea below.  
  
Mira wanders in just after sunset. She jumps when Clint greets her. “Fuck, Barton. You always hang around in the dark?”  
  
Clint hadn’t really noticed it getting dark. He says nothing and after a minute Mira crosses to the mini-fridge in the corner of the lounge. Taking a bottle of vodka out of the freezer, she unscrews the lid and takes a long pull, wincing as she swallows.  
  
“Will and I were recruited together,” she says conversationally, like they’ve been talking all along. “We didn’t really get to know each other until he started dating his wife, though. I mean, she wasn’t his wife then, they were just dating, but he kept asking me for advice. Like because I was a woman, I’d know how all women worked, and I’d be able to tell him if buying roses was still something that guys do.” She snorts and takes another swig from the bottle, shorter than the first. “Fucking roses. Oh god, Amanda.”  
  
Clint runs through the short list of casualties from the team and draws a blank. “Who’s Amanda?”  
  
“His wife. Amanda Huffman. They have three kids.” Mira stares down at the floor. Her eyes are bloodshot. “How-- _why_? Why would somebody just--kill him like that?”  
  
 _Why do you think?_ Clint wants to ask, but doesn’t. Big anthills always attract big sticks.  
  
Eventually Mira stumbles back out clutching the bottle, probably back to hover around the med bay and see if she’s going to have to grieve for anyone else tonight.  
  
Clint doesn’t follow. He’s not their teammate; he’s not a friend that they turn to for advice. Instead he goes looking for Coulson and Fury.  
  
He finds them together, naturally, hunched over personnel files in the bridge. The rest of the troops seem to be cutting their table a wide berth. “What, Barton?” Fury demands, tired and pissed.  
  
“I want her,” Clint announces. “You’re putting together a team to go after the shooter, right? I want point.”  
  
They both look at him sharply. Barton lets them take in the tactical suit that he hasn’t taken off, the bruises covering his arms and face, and the bandages wrapped around his feet that he’s technically supposed to stay off of for a couple of days. They’re probably soaked through. He wasn’t even aware of the pain until now.  
  
He knows he looks unhinged. He’s betting that it works in his favor.  
  
Coulson speaks first. “Are you familiar with the ex-KGB agent Black Widow?”  
  
So that had been her. Clint’s never seen the Widow before but, “I’ve heard stories.”  
  
“They don’t compare to fact,” Fury bluntly informs him. He tosses down the pen in his hand and sits back, lacing his fingers together. “Natasha Romanoff is one of the most effective, ruthless killers in the world. As a KGB agent she was deadly. As a gun for hire she is worse. Six months ago the Russian government went so far as to turn over most of their classified personnel files, in the hopes that we’d have more luck catching her than they have. The Russians have tried to catch her, the Chinese have tried to catch her, and she’s killed every single agent they’ve sent.”  
  
They both evaluate his reaction. Clint gives them his widest, most cheerful grin. “Well, thank god you know somebody who’s _disposable_.”  
  
Neither of them denies it, though Coulson has the grace to look discomfited. Fury doesn’t even blink, just considers it for a few seconds before saying, “All right, Barton. You want the Widow, you’ve got her. Agent Coulson will provide you with all the necessary intel. Coulson--put together a support team. I’ll expect regular updates and I expect _results_ , gentlemen. Anything else?”  
  
“Yeah.” Clint leans forward, putting his knuckles on the table to get level with Fury’s eye. “I want my _fucking bow_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Picture of Seoul hotel from public domain.  
> Gifs of Clint sniping from the movie 28 Weeks Later; gifs created by wilderwind on Tumblr.


	4. Jedlicze

**4.**  
  
S.H.I.E.L.D helicarrier – somewhere in the Indian Ocean   
  
“This isn’t my bow,” Clint says, turning over the smooth black weapon in his hands.  
  
“The design is based on your bow,” Coulson tells him. “I asked R&D for some input.”  
  
They’re in the weapons locker, a place that Clint has never previously been allowed within a hundred feet of. The numerous guards look a little nervous about his presence, even with Coulson standing next to him.  
  
Clint draws the string back without an arrow, sighting down its length. God, that feels good. He lets it go slack, rubbing his thumb over the high-tension string. “I’m gonna need to shoot with it a few times before we take in the field.”  
  
“Of course. And while you’re at it…” Coulson crosses to one of the many shelves lined with AK-47s, Berettas, knives, grenades, and other assorted weaponry--Clint tries hard not to examine the bazookas too closely--and takes down a long, thin weapons box that’s exactly the right length for arrows.  
  
Clint’s fingers twitch against the bowstring. Coulson notices and smiles grimly. “You can try out the new R&D arrows, too.”  
  
They head out to the adjoining firing range. There are a few agents already out there, earmuffed and goggled, putting bullets into distant targets. Several of them jerk their chins at Clint as he passes; here, they are familiar with his presence and respect his skillset.  
  
One or two look doubtfully at the bow. Clint has his own doubts, but not for the same reasons. The bow feels too good in his hands, too familiar and yet alien at the same time. After weeks of hefting around bulky guns, the lightness is a joy; yes he doesn’t miss how the bow matches the S.H.I.E.L.D uniforms around him. They might as well have stamped their logo on it.  
  
Coulson, though, is all smiles. Well, not _smiles_ , exactly, but Clint can tell that he’s pleased with himself. “We’re still working on prototypes, but these are the ones we’ve got so far. Cable arrow.” He holds up an arrow with a thick shaft and a blunt tip that flicks open into three sharpened grapple prongs. “Has a 50-foot spool of .036-inch steel cable built into the shaft. There’s a clip between the flights, here, that can be attached to a harness or belt. It has a carrying capacity of about 325 pounds, so try to limit your passengers to one at a time.”  
  
“Duly noted,” Clint responds. He’s not sure who the hell Coulson expects him to be giving rides to. Clint has one purpose in the grand scheme of S.H.I.E.L.D, and it’s not as a swoop-in-to-the-rescue kind of guy.  
  
“Suction arrow, with micro-adhesors. Electro-arrow, generates 21,000 volts upon impact--”  
  
“Ooo,” Clint says, perking.  
  
“I thought you would enjoy that one. Just try not to use it around water. Net arrow, we’re still working on some glitches with the net so give R&D your input, and explosive tip arr--”  
  
He cuts off as Clint snatches that one out of his hand, turns, and fires it at their target. It strikes a little off-center: the bow’s heavier than his original flavor and he hasn’t shot in months. It doesn’t particularly matter, though, once the arrow’s tip explodes with the force of a grenade.  
  
Clint watches the flaming, smoking pieces of the target fall to the ground. When the automatic fire extinguishers switch on, covering the whole area with foam, he turns to Coulson. “If I were even slightly into dudes, I would so make out with you right now.”  
  
Coulson eyes Clint’s ear-to-ear grin with equal parts amusement and weariness. “If you tried, I’d have to call the janitor to mop up what was left of your body.”  
  
The rest of the day is much less exciting: Clint has a feeling that Coulson led with the explosions, lulling him into a false sense of security then dumping a mountain of files on him. Only half of it has been digitized. The rest forms a literal hill of papers.  
  
Clint says nothing out loud, but Coulson predictably catches his thoughts and smiles blandly. “Welcome to the reality of the intelligence field.”  
  
Scrubbing a hand over his face, Clint doggedly takes a seat at the table. The tabletop screen lights up, displaying all the digitized records. “I already miss being the point-and-shoot guy.”  
  
Coulson makes a little _hm_ noise then asks, “Why are you doing this? You know how dangerous Romanoff is. You weren’t friends with Huffman or any of the other agents we lost. So why ask for this?”  
  
Clint meets Coulson’s searching gaze and cocks his head. “Maybe I just don’t like getting shot at.”  
  
They have a little stare-off for a few minutes, neither of them cracking. For once Coulson backs down first, turning for the door.  
  
Over his shoulder he says, “A suggestion? Start in São Paulo.”  
  
Clint watches him leave, turning over the question in his own mind. He hadn’t been exactly lying: Clint is a sniper by trade, and the idea of someone getting that close to taking him out scrapes at the underside of his skin like a splinter.  
  
Far more important than pride, though, is survival. He hadn't needed to remind Fury that he's expendable. The man probably has a list in his head that ranks all of his employees, allies, and prisoners on a scale of "Vital to the Mission" to "Cannon Fodder." Clint knows where he falls on that scale; odds are he would have wound up on this strike team one way or another. At least this way he's in the driver seat instead of an extra-expendable tagalong. If it buys him some goodwill in the grieving, vengeful S.H.I.E.L.D ranks, then more's the better.  
  
And then there's the simple curiosity, which might be just as likely to get him killed as Fury's machinations. Clint's heard stories about the Black Widow from Trick Shot and Barney and anyone else even remotely involved in the murder-for-hire industry. She’s a child prodigy of death: not that Clint started much later--that night in Kansas, cicadas screaming in his ear and blood in the tall grass, fifteen years old--but there’s something about a little girl with a gun that gets people’s attention.  
  
Now Clint has every single one of those stories, or at least the verifiable ones, at his fingertips. That thought is enough to set him on his thankless task, digging through the files.  
  


>   
>  **São Paulo - 23.5555° S, 46.6685° W**
> 
> The report comes courtesy of a junior S.H.I.E.L.D agent named Charles Russell. A note at the start of the file explains that no senior agents were able to give report, and references the casualty summary.
> 
> Russell’s inexperience shows: he stumbles through the details of an already-confusing event. He’d been assigned to the São Paulo office as an analyst; his primary task was to monitor paramilitary activity in the area, and assess whether it would be more beneficial to ally with the government or the rebels.
> 
> All of that changed, though, in one afternoon. A distress call came in from a S.H.I.E.L.D operative; Russell didn’t have the clearance to even know what the operative had been doing or how he’d gotten involved in the hospital situation, and no one would tell him even after the fact. His frustration bleeds between the carefully-edited lines of the report.
> 
> How ever the operative had gotten involved, the situation was already well out of hand by the time reinforcements arrived. They pulled everyone, because a S.H.I.E.L.D operative was in trouble and they took care of their own.
> 
> In this case, that had just made the casualty list longer.
> 
> The Hospital Geral Jesus Teixeira Da Costa was located right in the heart of sprawling São Paulo. With the fire started, six departments sent trucks, men, and equipment. The entire São Paulo S.H.I.E.L.D office went, except for Russell: he’d been left behind to man the radios while the others went to get their people out of the fire.
> 
> It was hard to tell exactly what had happened. Reports over the radio became increasingly chaotic. People got trapped and screamed for blueprints that Russell didn’t have. The fire spread faster than it should have; it was planned to spread faster than it should have, enveloping potential rescuers as well as hospital staff and patients.
> 
> Worse, a site survey conducted during the cleanup process revealed that all the emergency exits had been blocked with debris. In two cases the cause was not definitive, but one door had been wedged shut with a fire extinguisher, which had first been emptied...

  
  
“Shit,” Clint breathes.  
  
Barney used to say that saints are people who can afford to be. Clint doesn’t like to hold on to much of his brother, but that saying’s always proved true.  
  
There is cold-blooded murder, though, and then there is this.  
  
“Impressive, huh?” Coulson leans against the doorway, coffee cup in hand. Clint wonders if Coulson knew how long it would take him to read through the document, or if he somehow monitored the digital file to let him know when Clint was nearing the end. Either option kind of creeps Clint out.  
  
“She’s thorough,” Clint admits. “You’re sure it was her?”  
  
“Video surveillance of a parking garage across the street caught her leaving the hospital right before the fire started, and once Russia turned over their files on her we were able to confirm fingerprint data. The only thing we’ve never been able to figure out was the target. The agent who made the distress call had been at the hospital for a few stitches incurred on a previous mission.” Coulson’s mouth quirks grimly. “Afterwards, it was made mandatory that all S.H.I.E.L.D offices have their own med wing.”  
  
Clint feels a flicker of sympathy for poor Russell: apparently pet assassins get more intel than he does. “Wrong place, wrong time? In our line of work?”  
  
Coulson walks over to join him at the table, setting down the coffee mug. It has an American flag on the side. “The agent in question was mid-level, with only local intel access. Not someone that you burn down an entire hospital to kill.”  
  
“Then who?”  
  
A tension that Clint has never seen before seeps into Coulson’s expression. “We’ve gone through every single casualty, every patient, even the emergency crews. There was a geneticist from Peru working in cutting-edge cancer research, but the research died with her. A local politician with some enemies, but no one who wanted him dead that bad, and certainly no one who could afford to hire the Black Widow. We’ve never been able to work it out.”  
  
Clint frowns down at the digital file then uses his finger on the tabletop to push it aside. “Well, Christ knows I’m not going to figure out what you can’t. What other bedtime stories you got, boss?”  
  
Something else flickers over Coulson’s face that looks kind of like disappointment. What it’s doing there, Clint has no idea, and it’s gone before he has to figure out what to do about it. “We’re running facial recognition software on every camera that sends a digital signal further than twenty feet. If any of them catch her on tape, we’ll know inside of twenty minutes.”  
  
Clint smirks without humor. “Wow. Suddenly I don’t feel so bad that you guys found me.”  
  
  
  


  


**Jedlicze - 49.7164° N, 21.6220° E**   


It’s another two days before they get a hit on the facial recognition.  
  
Clint’s team--and it doesn’t even occur to think of them as _his team_ until he boards the jet with Coulson and finds them all there, waiting to start the briefing--consists of Mira, an analyst in glasses, two field agents, and a tall guy who’s so clearly Baldy’s replacement that Clint mentally dubs him “Baldy 2: Electric Boogaloo” despite the full head of hair.  
  
For his part, Baldy 2 takes one look at the bow strapped to Clint’s back and says, “Dude, you gotta be fucking kidding me.”  
  
Before Clint can say anything, Mira speaks up sharply. “Shut it, Donner. In Seoul he was the only one shooting back.”  
  
Apparently Seoul has already become the ultimate cautionary tale among the S.H.I.E.L.D rank and file. Clint’s not sure how he became the white knight of the story, but he’ll take it if that keeps him alive and in arrows.  
  
They strap in and the Quinjet takes off. Clint hopes they’re not going anywhere with strong air currents: this thing doesn’t feel too steady.  
  
Coulson presses a remote and small screens flicker to life above their seats. They display the image of a red-haired woman exiting an apartment building.  
  
"This is Natasha Romanoff, aka Natalia Romanova, aka the Black Widow. Expert marksman, expert in hand-to-hand combat, expert in stealth. This picture was taken by a street camera six hours ago outside a bank in Warsaw. She left town in a hurry but fortunately we had a surveillance drone in the area and we were able to track her south until she entered a small church just outside the town of Jedlicze. No movement in or out for the last hour."  
  
The screen splits into two frames. On the left is a shot of the church's front, likely taken from a drone; on the right is a satellite view of the area. It's a small, crumbled wooden structure, the remains of a medieval entertwining between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox.  
  
"Good place to store supplies," Clint comments, studying the area for sightlines. "Deserted, easy access to the borders with Slovakia and the Ukraine."  
  
"We'll be going in via helicopter and dropping you in a split perimeter. We have no idea what supplies Romanoff has, but if this is her storage space then chances are she'll be well-equipped. Donner, Barton, you're on long-range fire. I will be up top coordinating movements." He pauses then continues. "Official orders are to attempt to take her alive for questioning. However, attempting to take her alive will most likely end up in you dead, so. I'm giving you permission to level the building so long as you can still get a good ID on her body. Any questions?"  
  
Clint raises his hand. “Have you ever considered using your powers for evil, sir?”  
  
He’s learned that he can say just about anything he wants to Coulson so long as he still tacks on "sir" at the end of the sentence. Sure enough, Coulson doesn't even glance his way. “Evil doesn't have a retirement plan.”  
  
They land at a NATO airforce base. Not for the first time, Clint wonders exactly who S.H.I.E.L.D answers to, and decides all over again that he'd rather not find out. In the hanger they transfer to UH-60 stealth Black Hawks, and rise up into a raincloud like silent birds.  
  
A thrill runs through Clint, thrumming down through him in time to the helicopter blades. He loves this part: later the thrill of adrenaline will turn sour as a hangover, but now there's only the bow on his back and a target to strike. This is what he _does_ ; it is, he thinks, all that he ever really needs in the world. The lights of Jedlicze twinkle below, cold rain stings his skin, and Clint feels like laughing.  
  
So of course it all turns to shit.  
  
Two minutes after they touch down, descending from the chopper on zip-lines, headlights and squealing tires breaking the spell of stealth. A dozen cars screech to a halt around the church. Their occupants pour out shouting in Polish and don't even wait for a reply before they open fire.  
  
"Fuck!"  
  
"Cover! Get to cover!"  
  
Covert approach abandoned, they dive for the little church, returning fire over their shoulders. The interior of the building is even more derelict than the outside, filled with musty pews and pigeons but otherwise empty. Rain pours through holes in the roof, covering the floor in an inch of water.  
  
Their assailants are close behind, firing constantly. Someone goes down; Clint is too busy firing arrows to see who it is. Baldy 2 drags them behind the pews and shouts, "It's a trap!"  
  
"No shit, Ahkbar! Coulson, who's out there?"  
  
"Cars are unmarked," Coulson answers on the comms, his voice tight. "Running plates now."  
  
A head appears in the doorway and Clint puts in arrow in one of its eyes then ducks the wild return fire. Putting his back against a pew, he asks, "If we get out back, can you extract us?"  
  
"The treeline is too thick. Can you get to the roof?"  
  
"Yeah, and have it cave under us. Lay down covering fire and buy us some time!"  
  
"On it." Overhead the sound of a mounted assault rifle kicks in.  
  
A bullet hits the pew near Clint and showers him with splinters as he runs through their options. A grenade or explosive arrow would turn the rotting wood around them into shrapnel. Whoever's out there seems pretty disorganized but they've got numbers and the element of surprise on their side. Movement outside indicates that someone's gotten them in order and they're massing on either side of the doorway for an organized rush. Too bad Coulson didn't give him arrows that can shoot around corners...  
  
Clint jerks then twists sideways, shouting at the others. "Get on the pews!"  
  
"What!" Baldy 2 yells back.  
  
"Everybody get on the fucking pews _now_!"  
  
It's a testament to S.H.I.E.L.D training that all around him boots thud on wood. Clint jumps up onto the back of a pew just as a guy in full riot gear swings in the doorway, his boots sloshing in the water. He aims for Clint's chest.  
  
Clint shoots first, his bow aimed at the ground underneath the man's feet.The flight of the arrow is beautifully, gratifyingly silent, just a faint hiss under the constant barrage of gun blasts, and a thwack that even Clint barely hears when it lands.  
  
Everyone hears the aftermath, though, and sees it too. The entire church lights up with white and yellow streaks of electricity, blinding and jagged and crackling. The voltage is strong enough to set a mild shock through the air, prickling Clint’s skin and making his heart flutter in his chest. It travels outside through the water, and screams follow its path.  
  
Eventually even that fades. As silence falls in the church Clint sets another arrow to his bow and waits for any of the still bodies on the ground to get back up.  
None of them do. Instead, the smell of burnt flesh cuts through the rain.  
  
In the darkness Baldy 2 says, “Well damn, son.”  
  
  
 **S.H.I.E.L.D aircraft carrier – somewhere in the Pacific Ocean**  
  
It shouldn’t matter to Clint that everyone gets back to base alive.  
  
Coulson certainly seems happy about it, if the tiny quirk of approval in his mouth is anything to go by. Mission not accomplished, but no hats on the ground; one of the field agents took a round in his vest, but she’ll live. That seems to be enough for him.  
  
Privately Clint thinks that he’s setting his standards pretty low.  
  
One of the goons survived electrocution and turns out to be the local secret police. They’d gotten a tip about a terrorist cell--an anonymous tip, of course. It’s a diplomatic nightmare, as the Polish government demand answers and S.H.I.E.L.D demands what the hell happened to asking for ID before they came in guns blazing.  
  
Coulson spends most of the night putting out fires. By the time he comes looking, Clint’s buried so deep in Romanoff’s files he barely glances up before he spits out, “You were wrong, and I don’t say that lightly. São Paulo wasn’t the place to start.”  
  
Coulson hangs in the doorway for a long moment, and Clint is too busy to figure out if he’s insulted or surprised or both. Finally he walks into the room and sits down, though, so he can’t be much of either one.  
  
In fact, there’s a look on his face like he’s pleased. It’s a dangerous look, but Clint’s head is too full of Natasha Romanoff to think much of it right now. “So where do we start?”  
  
“Here. Tonight. How pissed off is the Polish government?”  
  
“Pissed.”  
  
“Right. And we’re pissed at them. Ten gets you five that they were hunting her, too, and now not only are we too busy fighting with each other, Hell’ll freeze over before the Poles share whatever intel they’ve got.”  
  
“I think I won’t take that bet. How does that change our profile of Romanoff?”  
  
Clint pushes through the files that he’d barely skimmed earlier, spreading them out before him. His fingers tap the paper, unable to stay still for even a moment. He’s still in his tactical gear. A puddle has formed under him. He wants to put his fist through a wall or something else mindless and simple and potentially quite painful, but instead he focuses his mind on the threads of history laid out in front of him, tying the disparate strands into a whole.  
  
“She’s more than ruthless,” Clint says. “She’s _neat_. She cleans up after herself. Whoever the target was in São Paulo, there was a lot of collateral damage and she pissed off more people than she finished off. That’s not her style. She’s more careful than that. We thought we had her tonight, and she took us out of the fight without backup or intel, and without firing a shot. That is...fucking _championship_ levels of game.”  
  
“So how do we outplay her?” Coulson asks.  
  
“I don’t know yet,” Clint murmurs, his eyes roving over the files. “But I’ll let you know when I do, sir.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Picture of Hawkeye's arrows from the comics (exact author unknown)  
> Picture of Natasha from the Avengers  
> Picture of the helicopter (which is an Apache, actually, but I couldn't find any good ones of a Black Hawk) from the US Army  
> Picture of the Quinjet from concept art for the Avengers (exact author unknown)


	5. Culiacan

**5.  
  
S.H.I.E.L.D helicarrier – somewhere over the Gulf of Oman**  
  
Over the next seven months, Clint learns three things about Natasha Romanoff.  
  
Number one: she is professional to the point of fanaticism.  
  
S.H.I.E.L.D has a handful of new prisoners courtesy of Clint and Coulson's pursuit and every one of them knows Romanoff by a different name. She never works for anyone who knows her true identity and she rarely works for the same person twice. Most of the time she works alone, though she assisted a particularly inventive art theft ring in Italy with a heist that involved pigeons and a hoverbike; Clint suspects that she was more drawn by their method than by the money. She has no personal loyalties: she is not adverse to taking a job that works against someone she’s worked _with_ before. If she has any confidantes or friends, they are even better at hiding than she is.  
  
Every one of her jobs has the precision of a scalpel. Most entail espionage both political and corporate in nature, even the ones that don’t end with bodies on the ground.  
  
Sometimes Clint has to step back from her file and flip to the front. Stare at her picture until he remembers that she’s an actual person instead of a reproduction of the perfect operative.  
  
He wonders if she ever forgets, too.  
  
Number two: she never stops moving.  
  
There's a town in the Republic of Ireland called Graiguenamanagh. Clint has no idea how to pronounce it; he just knows that Ireland is one of the only places in the world that a) primarily speaks English (even the mangled kind) and b) won't extradite people for terrorism or other crimes punishable by the death penalty.  
  
Clint doesn't have a whole lot of those but he's only got one life, so he's always been careful to never take a job in the Republic of Ireland.  
  
He's got a cottage in Graiguenamanagh. It’s nothing fancy, just a downstairs kitchen and living room, then the bedroom and bathroom upstairs. The view from the front door overlooks a river that he doesn’t know the name of but probably sounds like a fish gargling.  
  
Sometimes after a big job, or just when he was feeling worn down, he’d spend a couple of weeks at the cottage, drinking beer and sitting in the front doorway, watching the water move by.  
  
He hasn’t been back there since S.H.I.E.L.D found him. He misses it at odd moments, the pang of loss that gets quickly tucked away again. Clint doesn’t know how much S.H.I.E.L.D has on him: if the little cottage in Graiguenamanagh is still safe or not. He doesn’t dare try to find out.  
  
Romanoff doesn’t seem to have a Graiguenamanagh. More’s the pity: she’d probably know how to pronounce the damn name. She stays in constant motion, bouncing off the big jobs like she’s teflon.  
  
Every time Clint thinks that, he spends a while staring at her picture again. There’s a person in there, he reminds himself. A woman with flaws and weaknesses. He just has to find the right one.  
  
Number three: "It's called _Krasnaya Komnatah_.”  
  
“The Red Room,” Coulson fills in unprompted. “Russian black ops program, a step above the KGB, formed shortly before the fall of the USSR. Romanoff was sent there when she was thirteen years old. Which is the grand total of what we know about the Red Room.”  
  
He has that tight, irritated look on his face again. Clint doesn’t blame him: the file the Russians had turned over had been mostly censored, line after line of black bars.  
  
Fortunately Clint doesn’t really care all that much about the program itself. “Whatever it is, that’s what made her run.”  
  
An explosion shakes the helicarrier, making Clint grab the edge of the table and Coulson brace his elbows on its surface. Coulson straightens with a frown. “What do you mean?”  
  
Clint scowls, pushing through papers that had been knocked askew. “She goes into the Red Room at age thirteen, right...she goes in, and whatever training happens there, it works. Ha!” He digs up the paper that he was looking for, a hand-scribbled note on the back of a manila envelope. Among the carefully formatted S.H.I.E.L.D reports, it looks like a punk teenager lurking at a Young Republicans convention.  
  
Clint pushes the envelope at Coulson. “These are her confirmed kill tallies, every year, before and after she entered the Red Room. And yeah, you can say the increase is because she got older and better, but still...”  
  
“It’s significant,” Coulson says, eyeing the scrawled numbers. “How does this translate into her leaving the Russians?”  
  
“That’s the thing: it doesn’t.”  
  
He cuts off as something thumps hard against the outer windows. One of the flying bug-robots currently attacking the helicarrier has suctioned to the glass and peers in at them with about three dozen googly, battled-crazed eyes.  
  
Clint jerks his thumb at the bug. “Should we be concerned about this?”  
  
“Hill has it under control,” Coulson replies as the bug peels away in the force of the wind and promptly gets shot down by one of the battle drones buzzing around the ship. “Go on.”  
  
“The program--whatever it is, it worked. Her kill stats went off the charts. For the next three years she they sent her after Russia’s worst enemies and she took them all out without breaking a sweat. Then, one day, she cut and ran. Why? She was at the height of her game, she was a highly-valued asset, and she had to know that they’d be coming after her.”  
  
“Maybe she thought she could do better freelance?” Coulson suggests.  
  
“What, and spend her whole solo career looking over her shoulder? The Russians are desperate to kill her--the fact that they’re willing to share what they have is proof of that. Speaking from experience, you don’t piss off someone that powerful no matter how bad you want out.”  
  
Coulson had opened his mouth, but now he closes it and looks up at Clint sharply, his brow creased. Clint backs up, reconsiders, then realizes that’s exactly what he meant to say.  
  
Instead of apologizing or redirecting he asks, “Coulson, is there or is there not a standing kill order on me? If I run, is there an order to take me out?”  
  
The troubled expression deepens. That’s the only acknowledgment that Coulson gives but it’s more than enough. Clint nods and looks away. _There is Us, and there is Them_.  
  
“You don’t run unless you’ve got a good goddamn reason,” he says. “Unless staying would be worse. Whatever the Red Room is, it was worse than all the people they sent her to kill and it was worse than spending the rest of her life hunted.”  
  
Coulson sits back, wiping his face of emotion. “How do we use this information?”  
  
“ _We_ don’t.” Clint twists his mouth into a sardonic smile and sketches a shrug. “I’m just the borrowed gun, remember? But if this program was as successful and as unpleasant as I think it was...”  
  
“Then there are probably others,” Coulson finishes, his chin rising and his eyes lighting up with understanding. “Maybe even others who are looking to defect. Good work, I’ll do some more digging.”  
  
Clint nods and carefully doesn’t mention that his thoughts had run more towards _kill_ than _recruit_.  
  
Another explosion, bigger than the last, rocks the helicarrier, and an overhead alarm starts to go off. It’s a minor alarm, though, so Coulson merely climbs to his feet instead of bolting. “We should probably go see if Hill needs help.”  
  
“Is she working out?” Clint asks. Hill’s a recent promotion, hand-picked by Coulson from the ranks of the junior agents to be his right-hand woman.  
  
Coulson purses his lips, watching the swarm of flying robot bugs from god-knows-who that have been attacking the ship for the last half hour. “I guess we’ll see.”  
  
“Great to know her trial-by-fire could get us shot out of the sky.” Clint finishes sweeping his papers into a haphazard pile and tucks them under one arm, grabbing his bow with his free hand. “You want me on the observation deck, sir?”  
  
“Yes. And Barton...”  
  
The tone of Coulson’s voice brings Clint up short in the doorway. Coulson gazes at him steadily. “I would consider disobeying the order.”  
  
Clint eyes him for a long moment. “But you’d do it.” Grass is green, the sky is blue, and Phil Coulson is a company man.  
  
Coulson acknowledges this with a head tilt, but adds, “I would consider it.”  
  
“You say the sweetest things, sir."  
  
-o-  
  
The swarm takes the rest of the day to clear out, and leaves one of the engines at half capacity. Fury gives them the order to go to sea and they touch down in the south Atlantic. That turns out have its own issues, as the holes that the bugs put in the hull quickly fill with water.  
  
Anyone not currently tasked with keeping them afloat is going floor-by-floor in the ship, clearing out any robot bugs that might have gotten inside. Someone from the R &D department pops by with some kind of new arrowhead for Clint that scrambles the bugs’ systems and reduces them to junk metal, so of course Clint gets point. That, and he’s fairly sure that someone, somewhere has noticed just how much time he spends in the invisible veins of the ship, learning its ins and outs.  
  
Still, there’s a fair amount of chance involved in Clint finding the transmitter.  
  
He’s squirming through the narrow, hot ducts above the server room. It’s too tight a space for his bow or even a rifle, so all Clint’s got is a Desert Eagle. He’s sweaty and underarmed and still bothered by the lack of information that they have on the Red Room, which is how a bugbot gets the drop on him, sliding down an intersecting duct from above and nearly taking his head off.  
  
Clint rolls to save his skull and winds up trapping the gun underneath him. The bugbot hisses and seriously, who designed a whole bunch of robots to look like praying mantises with wings? And why wasn’t that person locked up long before this sort of shit could happen?  
  
The bugbot lunges at him, clawed forearms extended, and Clint kicks out the grating to his left, swinging out to hang from the side of the duct with one hand. The room below is filled with banks of computer servers, humming placidly while he swears and claws for his knife.  
  
Above him the bugbot clatters around the inside of the duct. Swinging under the width of the duct, Clint manages to get his fingertips curled in the grating on the other side--only to have the bugbot immediately attack the movement, punching the grate loose and tumbling after. It falls ten feet down, lands on its many hind limbs, and leaps back up at him faster than a bouncy ball.  
  
Clint swings his legs up, kicking away the claws and wrapping his knees around the bot’s head. The momentum of its leap propels them both upwards and Clint’s head almost strikes the bottom of the duct even as his hand reaches inside, scrabbling.  
  
“Raid!” he yells. “Fuck this shit, who’s got the giant can of Raid?!”  
  
His fingers find the gun just as the bugbot’s mouth pincers open, prepared to take out a chunk of his guts. Jamming the barrel in its gaping maw, Clint opens fire. Instead of a fountain of bug guts, the bot’s skull splits open to reveal flailing machinery and shattered gears. The body stutters and goes limp, slipping out of his legs to crash on the floor.  
  
Clint’s about to heave himself back up into the duct when something on the server bank below him draws his attention. With a groan he bends his body in half, hooking his legs on the edge of the duct and swinging over the side, upside-down, to investigate.  
  
It’s a data transmitter. For two seconds Clint assumes that the bugs planted it--but the tech is S.H.I.E.L.D. He can’t say how he knows that just from sight, but he does. It has their compact, utilitarian design.  
  
Which begs the question: who would put a S.H.I.E.L.D spy device on the side of a S.H.I.E.L.D data server?  
  
For a long, long time Clint hangs there studying the data transmitter, until the blood flow to his brain starts making him dizzy. Then he swings back up onto the catwalk, takes his bow, and finishes clearing the rest of the ship of bugs.  
  
He leaves the transmitter where it is. He doesn’t mention it to anyone, even though he sees Coulson, Mira, Hill, and Baldy 2 at various points throughout the ship.  
  
There’s no reason for any of them to believe him. He could show them, but there are no cameras covering the access points to that particular duct. Clint has no way of proving that he himself didn’t plant the transmitter. _There is Us and there is Them_.  
  
Besides, with the exception of Coulson there’s no guarantee that whoever he told hadn’t planted the transmitter, either. In which case his good efforts would probably be met with a gun blast to the head.  
  
By the time he’s back in his little room, though, the idea muttering in the back of his head has grown to a strident voice, too loud to be ignored. It doesn’t make any kind of logical sense: S.H.I.E.L.D has tons of enemies, some of which spend years amassing a giant bugbot army.  
  
The transmitter, and whoever put it there, could be working for any of them. Or all of them.  
  
Or one in particular.  
  
Clint lies on his back, staring up at his gray ceiling, until his clock reads 02:31. Then he swings his legs out of bed and grabs his bow.  
  
  
  
  


  
  
**Culiacán - 24.8000° N, 107.3833° W**   


Culiacán is sunny and deadly, like a margarita laced with arsenic. It's the seat of the Sinaloa drug cartel: kids play football in the streets by day and run coke by night, feeding US addictions with little white pellets firmly ensconced in their asses. The cartel enforcers swagger through the streets, taking what and who they want.  
  
A few of them look sideways at Clint. He smiles, showing all of his teeth. Half of him wants them to take a shot: for almost a year he's had an angel on his shoulder (he has no idea how Coulson would feel about being called an angel) and he'd kind of like to see if he's got what it takes to swim with sharks.  
  
They let him pass. Clint tries not to be too disappointed.  
  
Leaving S.H.I.E.L.D had been anti-climactic as well. The whole place had still been a wreck from the bugbot attack; it’d made a great cover for Clint to steal some supplies and a boat. Baldy 2 has been showing him how to fly one of the Quinjets, but Clint doesn’t feel brave enough to try on his own in the middle of the night.  
  
Now, two days later, he moves through the streets with sunglasses on his face and a backpack slung on his shoulder. He'd taken nothing from S.H.I.E.L.D except his bow, a quiverfull of arrows, and a low-frequency scanner.  
  
They’ll have noticed his absence. Clint wonders if that information has found its way to the transmitter, and from there to his target.  
  
He's got the scanner hooked up to his ear, reading all the local police news. They murmur in his ear in Spanish; he gets like half of it, but it's not the language that counts so much as the tone.  
  
Whenever Romanoff strikes, he expects there'll be a rise. A big one.  
  
He imagines she's here on cartel business, or maybe for the Mexican  
government. Technically they're prohibited from assassinating Mexican citizens, but for the Sinaloa Clint thinks they might make an exception. Either way, in a place with this much firepower there’s no hope of keeping the job quiet for long.  
  
The rise comes. When it does, Clint moves out of the alleyway where he's been waiting, heading in the opposite direction to the crowd. They aren't running, but there's a steady, carefully casual stream of people moving away from a particular point in the hills overlooking the city.  
  
The citizens of Culiacán know how to stay out of trouble, and Clint lets them flow past him then heads the opposite way.  
  
Eventually he winds up in a neighborhood where the walls around the houses look bulletproof and all the streetlights have mysteriously gone out. Clint goes up and down the street a few times before he zeroes in on one house: a big old place done up in mission style, built around a wide square atrium in the middle.  
  
It's a beautiful, empty place, three stories tall with stucco walls. Clint passes through its rooms like a whisper, taking notice of the bare floors.  
  
This isn't her Graiguenamanagh, either, but it could have been. It was built to be the fashionable summer stronghold of a drug lord, surrounded by six-foot bulletproof walls topped by barbed wire.  
  
He wonders if she actually owns this place, or if she killed the owner then scrubbed their blood from the hardwood floors.  
  
The only inhabited room is on the second floor in the eastern corner. Its window looks out over the city. A wealth of observation equipment rests below the window, religiously organized. Whatever weapons she's using, she must have them with her; he doesn't see any backups, but there are plenty of .26 caliber magazines. There is a small bag of clothes, with a flowery sundress laid out. A brown wig rests on top of the dress.  
  
Clint runs his eyes over every detail hungrily then turns off the scanner in his ear, slips out of the room without touching anything, and goes upstairs to the third floor to wait.  
  
Time passes. The sky starts to lighten towards morning, almost imperceptible through the air pollution. A strong wind picks up, blowing inland from the sea and rattling the shutters of the house. By then Clint has settled with his back against the wall beside the door. He crouches on the balls of his feet, his bow across his knees, and lets everything inside him go still. He feels light, freed from bulky equipment and the watchful eyes of S.H.I.E.L.D.  
  
He is an arrow in flight, waiting for his target to come to him.  
  
When she does, no sound betrays her. That’s something he already knew: the wife of a murdered diplomat in Romania told officials with an edge of awed fear in her voice that the assassin had made no sound. That she’d seemed to appear in the room like a ghost.  
  
There’s no such thing as ghosts, fortunately, and Clint feels a slight change in the air, a breeze that moves up through the atrium as a door opens somewhere below then ceases as the door shuts again.  
  
Clint straightens slightly but does not move. The room she’s using as her recon point is directly below his feet.  
  
After a while something in the room below him rattles. No matter how silent she may be, her equipment is not. Clint listens to her gather up the spare ammunition and zip them into a duffel. He waits until she starts taking down the tripod scope beside the window before he starts to move.  
  
Slowly, slowly he slides his left foot forward while slowly, slowly he draws his left arm back. The wind outside is strong, strong enough to curve the path of an arrow provided the flights are large enough. Clint has just such an arrow fitted to the bowstring in his hand.  
  
In his mind he can see it fly, passing out of the window across from him and curling back in the wind to zip into the room below. He doesn’t need her alive, but he needs her in one piece, or at least enough for S.H.I.E.L.D to identify.  
  
Below him, Clint hears a different sort of click.  
  
Only his circus training saves him: he cartwheels sideways just as she opens fire, bullets punching through the floor. They follow him out the door as he does a series of one-handed backflips into the hall then cut off as she reloads.  
  
In the darkened, empty hallway upstairs, Clint puts his back to a wall and bares his teeth. Goddamn, she is good. Either that or she regularly shoots up buildings on the offchance that someone is sneaking up on her. Both options seem possible.  
  
“Agent Barton, I presume?”  
  
The voice drifts across the atrium from the floor below his. It’s female, with a strong Russian accent. He’s never heard her speak before. Clint hesitates, then switches arrows and slowly rises up.  
  
Romanoff stands in one of the arches of the atrium, a gun in both hands. She doesn’t shoot or run for cover when Clint stands up, just watches him get a bead on her with a kind of cool curiosity. Her hair is tied back in tight, complicated braids, but other than that she looks very much the same as she did in Seoul.  
  
“You can call me Clint,” he answers. “Miss Hawkeye if you’re nasty.”  
  
She tilts her head to one side. “You do not have your usual shadows.”  
  
“You sure about that? They might be ready to swing in right now.”  
  
She laughs, startlingly bright and charming. The sound jolts Clint, throws him off for a second, and he re-collects himself in a hurry. He bares his teeth back. There’s that question answered: no one could bluff that much confidence, not even her. “Okay, maybe not.”  
  
“Since you are here and I am here, may I ask you a question, Agent?” Romanoff inquires, as polite as you please while she keeps her gun trained on his chest. “Why the bow? My bullet could reach you before your arrow even gets halfway. You would die without even knowing if you had succeeded in killing me.”  
  
Clint smirks. “Lucky I got an exploding-tip arrow, then. I don’t even need to hit you to take you out.”  
  
Her weight shifts and she slowly takes a steps sideways, her right foot crossing in front of her left. “Still. It seems impractical.”  
  
Clint moves in mirror position to her, his left foot crossing in front of his right. They move down their respective hallways, their weapons fixed on one another.  
  
Clint asks, “When you run out of bullets, can you pull them out of dead people and reuse them? Or make bullets out of chair legs or pipes or whatever happens to be around?”  
  
“You make a fair point,” she admits, like they’re discussing the fucking benefits of bikram yoga. “I am surprised that S.H.I.E.L.D let you make that decision. It is—-distinctive, no?” Her lips quirk. “But you are not one for stealth, are you, Agent?”  
  
“I’m not an agent.” Four feet to his right there’s a white stucco column, one of the pillar supports for the atrium. There’s one about two feet to Romanoff’s left. Clint takes slightly wider steps.  
  
“No, you are not,” Romanoff agrees and her voice is cold. “You’re here so that they can sleep better at night. You’re a pet. A dog on a leash that they whistle up to do their dirty work.”  
  
“Arf arf,” Clint says and releases the arrow.  
  
He spins sideways behind the pillar, the retort of her gun ringing in his ears—but instead of a bullet, a shockwave knocks him off his feet.  
  
Rolling over and scrambling up, Clint draws another arrow. The atrium is empty, its walls chipped and dented but intact. Romanoff is gone.  
  
She shot the fucking arrow out of the air. “Holy shit,” Clint says in admiration as he shakes the ringing noise out of his ears.  
  
The ringing is swiftly replaced by something else: beeping.  
  
“Shit,” Clint says again, and runs for the third-story window.  
  
He barely makes it across the sill before the whole building explodes.  
  
  


> Bagel Buffet – 6th Avenue in New York City
> 
> Coulson makes it a habit not to have too many habits. He doesn’t always take the same route to the NYC S.H.I.E.L.D offices, he regular changes where he buys his groceries, and he uses the company car pool instead of buying his own, so that no one can predict what he’ll be driving at any one time. Of course that means he sometimes winds up driving a minivan, but it’s a necessary sacrifice for security measures.
> 
> The one habit he clings to is his morning trip to Bagel Buffett for coffee and a sesame seed bagel with almond and honey spread. Coulson gets it every time he’s in New York, because being in New York usually means that either Tony Stark has invented a new weapon that threatens the stability of the world or there’s an official review.
> 
> At the moment it’s the latter, and he’s going to need all the fortification he can get.
> 
> When he walks in the front door, the small bakery looks even more disorderly than usual. There are takeout boxes everywhere, and boxes that appear to have been repurposed as takeout containers.
> 
> The owner’s daughter smiles at him apologetically from behind the counter. Her hair’s making a desperate bid for freedom from her French braid. “I’m sorry, Mr. Phil, we’re out of sesame seed bagels. Someone, like, ordered every single sesame seed we’ve got. Seriously, all 200!”
> 
> Coulson gives her a polite smile. “That’s okay, Jeanine. I’ll take a poppyseed, with almond and honey spread.”
> 
> Jeanine made a face. “They ordered all of that, too. Like, literally, the order says,” she picks up a piece of paper from the counter and reads, “‘every single tub of almond and honey spread in the store.’ Someone’s gotta have, like, a football team to feed, I guess.”
> 
> Coulson’s eyes narrow. “May I see that receipt, please?”

  
  
It’s almost sunset by the time Clint’s pre-paid disposable cell phone rings. He puts it to his ear and says, “I hope you’re ready to consider disobeying that order, sir.”  
  
“Give me a reason to,” Coulson snaps.  
  
“S.H.I.E.L.D has a mole.” Coulson is silent. “And don’t tell me you haven’t considered it. Every time, she was ahead of us. Every time until now.”  
  
“You got to her?”  
  
“She’s still above-ground, but yeah. I got to her. Check the reports coming out of Culiacán.” The open cuts on his fingers prickle with antiseptic and Clint grits his teeth. He’s got first-degree burns on the back of his neck and he’s pretty sure that at least one rib has been bruised.  
  
What stings worst, though, is the memory of Romanoff calling him a dog on a leash with nothing but cold disdain in her eyes.  
  
“Next time you want to conduct an internal audit of our security, please give me some advance notice. What’s your location?”  
  
“I’m not coming back in.”  
  
There’s a long pause. “Why?”  
  
“Look, it’s better that you don’t know. Plausible deniability. I need some intel on Romanoff. I threw a wrench in her plans and I’m guessing that her backup options are slightly more traceable than usual. Do you guys have a bead on her?”  
  
Another long pause. “I’m going to assume that you think I’m the mole, and that’s why you’re not telling me where you are. Because otherwise you would be ten millions kinds of stupid, and I don’t recruit stupid people.”  
  
Clint winces at the tightly-restrained violence in Coulson’s voice. “Sir, I need you to trust me on this.”  
  
“Are you joking? I have to go before the Council in--goddammit, twenty minutes to give report on how much a threat you are, and how best to track you down and _kill you_ , Barton!”  
  
“So tell them,” Clint says and goddamn he is going to regret this. If he lives to regret it. “Tell them I’ve been working with Romanoff.”  
  
“Have you?” Coulson asks in a hard, flat voice.  
  
“No, sir. But if we’re going to flush out the mole, we need to give him every opportunity to make it look like I am.”  
  
“So you want to run a counter-intelligence operation completely on your own, with no safety net, against both S.H.I.E.L.D and Romanoff, with--what supplies do you even have?”  
  
“My bow and a smile? Look,” he says when Coulson makes a doubtful noise. “Do you want to spend every mission looking over your shoulder? Or, screw that, how many other people at S.H.I.E.L.D know how much you like a good bagel?”  
  
“If they wanted to come after me,” Coulson says in a pleasant, mild tone that suggests he could find a way to turn almond-and-hazelnut spread into a deadly weapon, “they’re welcome to try.”  
  
“I don’t doubt it, sir. But you know as well as I do that we’ve got one shot at this. Whoever the mole is, once he knows he’s been compromised at S.H.I.E.L.D he’ll either grab what intel he can and run or torch the evidence and stay right where he is. Both options leave us severely fucked. And if _you’re_ the mole then I’m severely fucked. Now, I’m betting my life that you’re not. You want to make that risk worthwhile?”  
  
“What’s your plan?” Coulson asks slowly.   
  
“Romanoff’s too paranoid to warn the mole he’s been compromised. But if you go to the Council and say I’ve been working with Romanoff, they’ll do a sweep for unauthorized data transmitters. And they’ll find one, in the server room on level 4b. I saw it there after the bugbot battle.”  
  
“And whoever the mole is, they’ll see their chance to pin it on you,” Coulson finishes. “Barton...whoever it is, they’ll come after you. And so will the Council.”  
  
“I know. I’m hoping that the mole gets to me first. And if that’s gonna happen then I need to be wherever Romanoff is. So I’m asking you again, sir--do you know where Romanoff is heading, right now?”  
  
Over the phone line Coulson takes a deep breath and says:  
  
“Budapest.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Special thanks to maggiebloome and spinfrog for translating the Red Room's name.  
> -Picture of cottage from photographer Robert J. Carlsen  
> -Picture of Culiacan from a travel site  
> -Gif of Coulson from ivyarchive on Tumblr


	6. Budapest

**6.**   
  


  
** **

**Budapest - 47.5025° N, 19.0585° E**   


After Clint ends the call with Coulson he sucks it up, girds his fucking loins, and calls the Polish embassy.  
  
They don’t disappoint: within five hours he’s in the custody of the Polish secret police.  
  
Clint plays the reluctant turncoat, begging for asylum in exchange for intel on Romanoff and S.H.I.E.L.D. He lets them rough him up, pretends to hold out for a respectable length of time. He manages to break character only once, when one of them tries to break Clint’s bow over his knee as some kind of psychological ploy and succeeds only in bruising his own kneecap. Clint can’t help but laugh. That earns him a few fast punches to the face and seriously, Clint would feel bad about using them like this if they weren’t so clearly enjoying the ‘maim and bruise’ part of their jobs.  
  
So he spins a fictional rendezvous in Budapest, embellishing with not-fictional S.H.I.E.L.D involvement, and soon they’re in the air.  
  
It’s mid-morning by the time they land. A fog hangs low over the city: its many towers and minarets poke up like reeds in a swamp. Clint, who has spent the flight carefully cataloguing the unit’s supplies, waits until they’re on the tarmac before he makes his move.  
  
The Polish fuckers react a little faster than he’d hoped and Clint gets nicked by a bullet, in and out the meaty place just below his armpit, while jumping over the baggage truck. Clint hisses through his teeth and keeps running, dodging the small charter planes and airport workers, until he clears the fence surrounding the runway and slips into the fields beyond.  
  
Then he doubles back.  
  
Finding and following the Poles isn’t hard. Getting the hole in his side to stop bleeding is a little more difficult, especially whilst lying flat on his belly underneath a parked car down the street from an office-building-cum-secret-Polish-intel-p

ost. They’ve stopped actively looking for him, preferring instead to reconnoiter whatever intel they’ve got, but they’re still on high alert and it’s broad daylight on the street. Clint can’t do much except wad up a stolen shirt against his side.

He gives himself nine hours, tops, before infection starts to set in. Either way, this is gonna be a short party.

It takes just over an hour for the Poles to get their shit together and then they’re moving out like a herd of teenage boys, full of eager violence and poor judgment. Clint follows them deeper into the city, growing more and more skeptical.

When they reach their destination, he groans, “Oh, you’ve _got_ to be kidding me.”

The Budapest Opera Hall towers above the buildings around it, its stone facade lined with statues and columns and spotlights. It’s a sniper’s wet dream, full of balconies and archways and sharp corners. Too bad tonight Clint isn’t playing the role of sniper: he’s just the bait. He can’t see them, but he knows there are at least four S.H.I.E.L.D agents drawing beads on the building right now, and if Coulson’s done his work they’re all looking for Clint to pop his head out.

Tonight the Hall looks especially regal, as limo after limo inches through the streets outside, spitting out men in slick suits and women in flowing gowns--and all of them are wearing opulent, feathered masks. It’s a goddamn masquerade ball, and from the looks of the security details moving along the perimeter and escorting the guests, they aren’t the only ones in town packing heat.

This isn’t just acting like bait. This is slathering himself head-to-toe in blood and jumping into shark-infested waters.

Clint almost wheels his stolen car around, screw the plan, screw S.H.I.E.L.D and Coulson--and then he sees her.

She’s wearing a blonde wig and a golden mask and she’s facing mostly away from him; but Clint sees her step out of a limo and he knows it’s her.

She walks up the front steps of the Hall, her gown trailing slightly on the steps behind her. It’s strapless and the cloth is a soft mix of blues and greens, like the deep ocean. In the crowd of powerful men and fluttering female arm candy, she is solo and stately, turning heads as she glides up to the entrance.

She is the bait _and_ the hook, and Clint can’t help but get pulled in with the rest of them.

In contrast to her grand entrance, Clint almost gets killed walking in the door and not even by S.H.I.E.L.D or the Polish fuckers. He scales a wall and slips through a service entrance into the winding tunnels below the opera hall.

Above his head, the crowd is a dull roar of voices and feet. The tunnels are packed with props and wardrobe and half-dismantled set pieces. Clint ducks around what looks like the inside of a tree trunk, turns a corner, and comes face-to-face six heavily-armed men.

The goons look at Clint, the bloody shirt stuffed against his side and his bruised face. Clint looks at the goons and the thick crates they’re carrying. “Oh hi,” Clint says.

Forty-seven seconds later Clint steps over the twitching body of a fallen goon and pops open one of the dozens of crates strewn across the floor of the tunnel. For a long moment he frowns down at the contents, not quite sure of what he’s looking at. It’s like a puzzle whose pieces have been thrown back in their box at random, all jumbled together, and it takes some effort for him to mentally construct how the different parts would look if they were taken out and unfolded. But when he does...

“Oh, _shit_ ,” Clint gasps as the penny drops.

Upstairs, a string quartet strikes up a waltz.

Unfortunately the tunnels are arranged in a zig-zagging pattern, with no connecting ducts large enough to offer a shortcut. Clint sprints through the narrow passageways, moving steadily upwards. Along the way he encounters another goon in the process of strangling one of the opera hall’s security guards. Clint breaks the goon’s neck, throws her body to the ground, and keeps running.

Scrambling up a spiral metal staircase, Clint bursts up through a trap door to find himself on a second-level balcony just to the left of the stage. It’s an empty space, probably used as a secondary stage for one of those in-the-audience moments during a performance. On both side and above him, the balconies are full of revelers, leaning out from their perches to rubberneck and take pictures.

Below them, the main floor of the opera hall has been cleared of seats and filled instead with tables of food, towers of champagne glasses, and dancing couples.

His eye goes straight to Romanoff. She’s on the floor, dancing with a tall, dark-haired man with a goatee. The man’s face pings around in Clint’s mind a moment before it drops into place: Mano Anton de Sculliér, nicknamed “The Skull.” Hill had been tracking him as the possible mastermind behind the recent attack on S.H.I.E.L.D’s helicarrier.

Which means that S.H.I.E.L.D is most definitely here in full force, and they’re walking right into a trap.

The goons Clint had taken out downstairs had probably only been a fraction of Mano’s force. He’d stopped them from getting into position but there are undoubtedly others on their way right now.

Which means the only way any of them are getting out of here alive is if the trap springs early.

 _Ladies and gentlemen, for your entertainment: tonight the role of bait will be played by Clinton Francis Barton._

Assuming, of course, the mole in S.H.I.E.L.D doesn’t kill him first.

Or the Polish fuckers.

“Tally ho,” Clint says aloud, and vaults over the balcony to land amongst the dancers.

A few of them flinch away in surprise but others seem excited, like they expect him to break out in song. It might have something to do with the fact that he’s got his bow gripped in one hand and an arrow in the other. What they think of the blood and bruises and scorch marks, he doesn’t know.

Clint doesn’t spare a glance left or right. He moves across the dance floor towards Romanoff, and he does not run.

Security spots him about halfway there: the soft chatter of walkie-talkies rises on all sides. It’s still soft, though, given as he’s still moving relatively slow and isn’t actively pointing a weapon at anyone.

Clint keeps going.

Ahead of him on the dance floor Mano dips Romanoff low and cops a feel while he’s at it. She laughs. It doesn’t sound anything like her laugh in Culiacán, when she’d had a gun trained on Clint’s chest.

To Clint’s left, several of the Polish fuckers have emerged from the shadows and are moving on an intercept course.

Clint quickens his step just a hair.

Mano lifts Romanoff out of the dip.

Somewhere high, high up and to Clint’s right, Coulson’s voice bellows over the string quartet. “ _Barton! Four o’clock_!”

Clint doesn’t break stride. Of course he goddamn doesn’t. He takes that last step and uses the momentum behind it to punch Romanoff square in the face. She goes down, rolls, and comes up with her eyes blazing, a smear of red under her nostrils.

By then Clint has stabbed an arrow through Mano’s eye into his brain, yanked it back out, set it to his bow, spun his whole body--the arrow moving like the second hand of a watch--to four o’clock while simultaneously dropping into a crouch, and fired.

The bolt strikes Mira--fucking _Mira_ \--straight in the gut. She cups her hand around the shaft, her mouth falling open in shock. She’s in a flowing evening gown, cream-colored, and red seeps across the front of it. Her gun is in her hand. She fires blind as she goes down, the bullets mostly traveling upwards to strike the grand chandelier hanging above their heads.

That finally gets people to scream and run. Still on his knees, Clint swings around, scrabbling for another arrow. Romanoff is there, her lips curling and a gun in her hand. Christ knows where she had it--her cleavage, maybe. She draws a bead on his head just as he draws back the bowstring.

Above them, a new sound cuts through the screams and stampeding feet of fleeing partygoers. It’s a familiar noise: a guttural, snarling hiss with strangely metallic undertones.

Both Clint and Romanoff jerk their heads up, their weapons still trained on one another.

For half a second Clint thinks that the great domed ceiling of the opera hall is folding inward somehow, reorganizing itself like a Transformer...but no, it’s just crawling with bugbots. Hundreds and hundreds of bugbots. Some are the winged praying-mantis type that had attacked the helicarrier, but now they’ve been joined by fucking cockroaches and spiders and centipedes. Their metallic robot limbs clang together as they scuttle across the ornate architecture, their claws digging into marble columns and tearing velvet curtains.

The tenor of the crowd’s screams goes up several octaves as they spot the teeming, growing mass of giant robot insects above them. Clint glances sideways at Romanoff, who is eyeing it with her mouth pursed irritably.

When she drops her gaze to meet his, Clint raises an eyebrow. Her mouth tightens, but by silent agreement they both drop their weapons away from one another, relaxing out of their attack positions.

“So lemme guess,” Clint says conversationally over the roar of the bugs as he switches arrows. “You were selling the location of the helicarrier to Mano so that he’d distract us from you. Except then I screwed up your connecting job in Culiacán and you needed to get paid and kill him in a hurry to cover your tracks.”

Romanoff says nothing, just checks the ammo in her gun.

Clint continues undeterred. “Word of advice from a lapdog? Next time? Just knock over a bank.”

“Because that worked _so well_ for you,” Romanoff spits, the crack in her composure sharp and sudden enough to shock him.

“Maybe not,” he replies, his mouth moving on automatic, “but at least I never burned down a hospital.”

Romanoff flinches and that too is a shock. Her whole body twitches and stills; she stares at him from behind the mask. He can barely see her eyes, but the sudden horror there is unmistakable.

The bugs descend.

After that things get a little crazy.

There are too many civilians nearby for explosive arrows, but Clint manages to shoot six through the head before they hit the ground. Clint rolls to avoid one and comes up face-to-face with one of the Polish fuckers.

It doesn’t even occur to him that Romanoff switched targets until the Polish fucker _doesn’t_. He tries for a point-blank shot to the forehead and Clint has to do a fast circular cartwheel to avoid the bullet, get behind the guy, and stab an arrow into his left kidney.

The Polish fucker screams, flailing to shoot Clint over his shoulder before Romanoff rips the gun straight out of his hand and uses it to continue firing upwards at the swarm.

The rest of the Polish fuckers have more sense than their friend: they’re aiming at the swarm, too. _Everyone_ is aiming at the swarm. Clint spies Coulson up in the balconies, pulling off shot after shot with calm precision. The rest of the S.H.I.E.L.D agents have broken cover as well and are following Coulson’s lead, focusing their fire to cover the civilian evac. The hall’s security is less coordinated: half of them are shooting the bugs and half are either evacuating guests or trying to detain guests. It doesn’t help that a fair number of guests have brought their own, probably-unapproved bodyguards, who are busily defending their clients from all threats real or perceived.

Basically it’s a whole lot of firepower going off at once, and Clint, Romanoff and the Polish fuckers--wait, no, the last one of them just got his head ripped off.

Now it’s just Clint and Romanoff on the dance floor, in the center of a tornado.

With enough of the guests cleared out Clint brings out the big guns, or the big arrows as the case may be. He concentrates on the upper balconies, where the bugs seem to be making their entrance. Cinders and shattered wood rains around them as his arrows strike home, but the flow of bugbots slackens.

Soon the worst they have to fear aren’t the bugbot attacks, but the bugbot deaths: each impact smashes down like cars in a wrecking yard. Romanoff, though, has gotten her hands on a machine gun and is using it to cut holes in the whirling cloud of metallic claws above them. Clint fires a final explosive arrow up high and swings closer to her, kicking a fallen gun in her direction as he does so.

A few bugs have made it to the ground alive and Clint focuses his attention there, slinging his bow onto his back and taking a pair of electro-arrows in both hands. It’s a risky move: one point of contact between them when the arrow tip strikes home and he’s fried, too. He cartwheels and stabs and twists, careful to keep them away from Romanoff as she keeps the airborne ones off their heads.

At some point, between the explosions and the gunfire and falling bodies, Clint starts to laugh.

He’s distantly aware of the ache and dampness in his side that can only mean his bullet wound has reopened. His right eye is nearly swollen shut from the beating the Poles gave him, and the explosion in Culiacán had left first and second-degree burns across his back. Yet he’s beaming like a clown on speed as he looses another arrow at a cockroach-shaped freak dropping from the ceiling. When Romanoff runs out of ammo and grabs a guest’s discarded oxygen tank to make a flamethrower Clint breaks into outright laughter.

Romanoff cuts him a fast look full of incredulity and anger before she goes back to torching the more organic-looking bugbots. She’s lost her mask and there’s a cut on her face, high underneath her blonde wig. She is beautiful and terrible, a whirlwind of silk and fire.

So when Clint sees some guy in a monkey suit, probably one of Mano’s bodyguards, aiming a gun at Romanoff’s back, he doesn’t even hesitate to put an arrow through the asshole’s throat.

Eight months he’s spent working on her. No Johnny-come-lately is going to take that from him.

Romanoff doesn’t miss the save, and if anything she looks more pissed off than before. Clint just laughs and goes back to shooting bugs.

Eventually Clint takes a claw to the leg and it stops being funny. He stagger-limps his way under cover of the first balcony, shooting a bugbot out of his way so that he can put his back against a column. The wound in his leg is deep, seeping quickly through his dirty pants, and Clint whips off his belt, making himself a tourniquet.

Someone in tactical gear comes around the column and Clint gropes for his bow before Coulson’s voice tells him to, “Stand down, Barton.”

Coulson’s right behind his agent, dropping to a crouch next to Clint. “How bad are you hurt?”

“Well, sir, I’d make a ‘flesh wound’ joke, but I am actually concerned that I might bleed out.”

“C’mon, let’s get you out of here.” Coulson fits his shoulder underneath Clint’s, lifting him. For a moment Clint resist, turning his head to look back out on the dance floor. Natasha Romanoff is still out there in the rain of metal and bullets.

Coulson catches the movement and says, “We’ve got her. Come on.”

 _No, you don’t,_ Clint thinks, but he lets Coulson pull him away.

-o-

Clint wakes up in a safehouse with twenty stitches in his leg, another ten in his side, and Baldy 2 at his bedside. “For the record,” he informs Clint, “I’m a little disappointed that I don’t get to shoot you.”

“Your bedside manner sucks.” Clint’s eyelids feel like they weigh five pounds each and he lets them fall again. They’ve got him doped up but good; Clint hates knowing that parts of his body are hurting without his awareness. He would have gone without any painkillers at all if they’d let him.

“Romanoff?” he asks to distract himself from the conflicting sensations of lethargy and panic in his head.

“Got away,” Baldy replies stiffly.

Clint feels a little burst of pride that he immediately chooses not to examine too closely. “Mira?”

“Her body was recovered,” Coulson says from the doorway. “How do you feel, Agent Barton?”

Clint relaxes a little despite himself. Coulson won’t let him bleed out. That would be unprofessional. “Peachy keen, sir. Do we get to call Operation Molehunt a success?”

When he peels his eyes open again Coulson’s face looks tight. Belatedly Clint remembers that he hand-picked Mira, that she was his right-hand woman long before Clint joined the party.

“Of a sort,” is all that Coulson will allow. “You will be going back to base and reporting to Hill. I’ve got to go to New York.”

Clint frowns. “You only ever go to New York if the Council has a bug up their ass.” That’s not quite true: he’s pretty sure that all of Coulson’s days off are spent in New York, but part of their ability to work together depends on Clint pretending that Coulson never, ever goes to New York for personal reasons.

“Yes, well.” Coulson slides on his sunglasses, adjusting their frames to his liking before he shoots Clint a bland smile. “I just helped one of my people pretend to be a mole in order to reveal that one of my _other_ people was a mole. Frankly I’ll be lucky to get by with a demotion.”

That sends a stab of worry through Clint. He’s spent a long time getting used to Coulson, and vice versa. The last thing he wants is to start over with someone new. To cover his concern he suggests, “Push comes to shove, sir, you’re always welcome to join the dark side of the force. We don’t have benefits but we also don’t have any oversight.”

He doesn’t even have to see Coulson’s eyes to know they roll spectacularly as he turns on his heel and walks out of the safehouse.

-o-

The interior of the helicarrier is even less congratulatory. Hill meets him the moment he steps off the Quinjet, her mouth tight. “You’re confined to quarters.”

“Gosh, you’re welcome,” Clint replies smartly.

  
Hill folds her arms, a supremely defensive gesture. She’s younger than him and a lot younger than Coulson, and Clint thinks she’s probably more aware of that than anyone else at S.H.I.E.L.D. Everything about her posture screams, _I am the boss here_ , whereas Coulson simply _is_ the boss. No screaming necessary.

  
“You’re still technically listed as a hostile,” she informs him. “Until all the departmental trees correct that intel, I would _suggest_ for your own safety that you report to med bay and then stay in your quarters. Understood?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Clint hoists his bow and quiver, jerking his chin at the guard standing by Hill’s shoulder. “Lead on, compadre.”

They only get a few feet before Hill calls after him, “Barton? Good work today.” When he glances back, she nods stiffly.

Clint almost laughs but then thinks better of it. If he does wind up reassigned, Hill’s probably at the top of the list. He’d better start getting used to her officiousness now.

So he follows orders and gets his stitches checked out in the medical bay, then goes to his room like a good little agent. He does finagle a bottle of whiskey out of Joaquin, the geeky weapons tech who comes to collect and restock Clint’s quiver. Joaquin doesn’t even drink, but he lives in awe of the field agents and is forever sneaking them contraband. If Clint were a better person he would tell Joaquin to give up the James Bond fetish and find a different job.

As is, he settles in with the bottle for a self-congratulatory drink. There won’t be any nightmares tonight: he’s just run a successful counter-intel operation on S.H.I.E.L.D, Romanoff, and the Polish secret police. He toasts himself and takes a deep slug of Jim Beam, wincing in appreciation at the burn.

Briefly he thinks of Mira’s late-night vodka guzzling after Baldy 1 went down and wonders how much of that was an act or the pangs of a guilty conscience before he pushes her from his mind altogether.

Instead he drags his S.H.I.E.L.D-issue laptop out from the tangles of his comforter. He’d be surprised to find it there instead of a holding cell, but he knows how closely IT support monitors their personal devices.

Clint, who mainly uses this personal device for porn, has taken great pleasure in downloading the filthiest, most perverse videos and pictures he can find. A giant pig fucking a man doggie-style doesn’t exactly get him off, but he sure as hell enjoys knowing that somewhere, some poor bastard is duty-bound to examine each and every frame of said pig-fucking video for hidden messages.

This time when he logs into the computer, though, a message pops up. Clint has long since persuaded Joaquin to take him off the multiple S.H.I.E.L.D listservs, so he doesn’t get announcements anymore about security details and equipment repairs. The only messages he gets are porn offers and the occasional mass-forwarded dumb blonde joke from Baldy 2.

This message, though, is neither. For one, its sender is listed as **Natasha Romanoff**.

Clint sits perfectly still, staring at the screen. The message has no subject. The sender’s email address is a jumble of letters and numbers, likely meaningless and untraceable. When he finally clicks to display the message body, there isn’t one. There is, however, a jpeg attachment that his computer scans and promises him is virus-free. Not that viruses worry him: he’s downloaded so much porn on this laptop, the hard drive probably has herpes.

He opens the attachment.

It takes a moment for the image to download and then...his own face, battered and tear-stained and aged five years old, peers out at him.

Clint slams the laptop shut so hard he hears something crack. He just barely stops himself from throwing it across the room at the wall, too, and instead grips it in his lap.

Fuck. Fucking...fucking _bitch_. He should have let the security guard kill her in Budapest. He knows what she is: a killer. Why, _why_ the fuck had he saved her? He wants that moment back, wants to let her get gunned down by some random asshole like she deserves.

After a minute of fantasizing the various ways he can kill her, though, the fog of rage clears from his head and Clint starts to think again.

 _There’s always another level_. She always has a secondary purpose, and a third, and on. The picture’s meant to mess with him, yeah, but that’s not all.

Clint re-opens the email and studies the picture. He remembers the very moment the photo was taken, the night that one of the neighbors had actually gotten involved instead of turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to what went on in their house. They’d called the cops, not that it had done much good. It had been Iowa in the 1980’s. Clint and Barney had gone downtown and had photos taken of their bruises and scars. Pop had spent the night in the drunk tank. Then they’d all gone home again. That sense of deep futility, of isolation, might be his first memory.

That was before S.H.I.E.L.D, before the circus, before anything. Which meant that either Romanoff had gone hunting through old police files in Iowa, or she’d gone hunting for Barney.

That, too, is clearly meant to shake him, and maybe even make him rush off to search for his brother. If so then she’s misjudged the amount of affection Clint and Barney had for one another, which was approximately: zilch. Barney would have told her anything for the right price. If she’d killed him afterwards then it’s no skin off Clint’s back.

How ever she’d come by the photo, it can’t have been easy. She’d worked to find it then worked to find a way to send it to him. Clint knows without checking that the message will be untraceable. He’ll have to report it anyway: otherwise it’ll look suspicious when IT makes the report for him. Which means a whole lot of other people at S.H.I.E.L.D are going to see this picture, too, and Clint’s going to have to talk about it with them. The thought sets his teeth on edge.

She’s gone through a lot of trouble for this moment and that, too, is a statement. It means she’s looking back at him—at _him_ , and not as a S.H.I.E.L.D agent. This photo is about as personal as things get. She couldn’t have gotten hold of it in the last forty-eight hours, which means that she’d had it before but didn’t send it until now, until after Budapest. It means he’s got her attention.

It means, _Game on_.

A smile spreads over Clint’s lips. He looks through his own picture to the other pair of eyes who’d sought it out to use as a weapon.

He murmurs, “I’m gonna kill you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -Interior of the Budapest Opera Hall by ??? (Didn't save the source.)  
> -Image of woman in a mask from a travel website  
> -Gif of Clint fighting from The Bourne Legacy by secretagentclintbarton on Tumblr  
> -Image of Maria Hill from The Avengers promo


End file.
